"So you didn't...?" Cadance turned her head, a worried look ready to fall into anger upon her face.
"No! He's not even my type." The worried look scrunched up into confusion.
"Your... type?" Hmm, how best to convey this.
"I'm of the Imperial persuasion." Aurora cursed as the idiom left her lips, she could see that the royal horse hadn't understood from the deepening scrunch on the soft pink horse’s.
"Imperial...?"
"I'm..." Damn this Latinized abomination of a language! There wasn't really a word for it in English that she knew of. The phrase was pretty ubiquitous by the time English was even a language to begin with. There were euphemisms, but if they hadn't understood that... Ugh, if you can't go English, then you go Latin.
"I'm a tribas, or a tribades. I prefer females of the mammalian sort, and also identify as female, though not human, of course." She'd never cared for pre-imperial history, she was more interested in the human effort, not tribal squabbles. She was clutching at straws, but she could recall, distantly, one of her sociological teachers giving some latin and greek in passing.
"I... I guess I follow. Around here the term is filly fooler." Aurora felt servos tense a tad. 'Fooler' was not a word she liked. She could taste the dismissiveness. Hopefully she was wrong, her grasp of English usage was still poor, but she had started to get an idea of what words meant.
She still had no idea what sort of government they had, but, things were not looking great. backwards medicine, arms and armament. She had yet to see any slaves, but gods help these four legged assholes if she did.
She could feel the itch now to go a viking. What she would give to go raid ZzzZ'q space.
"So, the supplies, I can use pretty much any form those materials come in. If you can give me more paper and ink, I'll happily convey the specific mole weights I require. Or would you prefer a general atom count?" Aurora felt a small swell of pride as the pink horse nodded along slowly without pausing too hard in confusion.
"I'll get Twilight to go over it."
"I refuse!" Cadance winced as Twilight paced the room, huffing in frustration. "Your questions are fine she said, just sign these forms she insisted!" Twilight angrily motioned towards the huge stack of forms on the table. "Every time I bring her one form, she hands me another. I swear they've started repeating.” Cadance put on her best diplomatic face.
"I know it can be frustrating Twi, but she's very secretive. I'm sure if you help her out some, she'll open up." Twilight seemed to lighten up a bit. "Plus, maybe you'll find out more about those probes that she kept mentioning. That's what these are for." The impatient purple alicorn took up the pages of her magic.
"I really doubt that she uses the gold as a decoration, she really doesn't seem the type. Perhaps... I'd meant to talk with Celestia about using gold as a conductor instead of the obnoxious vacuum tubes her school is trying out. I'd wondered how something as big as her ship could effectively relay commands. That might be how." Twilight re-reviewed the two page material list. "This still doesn't explain how it would propel itself. Luna described it was like swimming fleas were dancing in her hair."
“It’s more of a tickling sensation.” The two mares turned towards the dark corner of the room, blinking in surprise as their minds registered the presence of a dark blue mare, as if they had just stepped out of the tunnel and were just then clearly seeing.
“Luna!” Twilight leapt over the table, nuzzling up to the majestically long legs of her friend and fellow alicorn, careful to keep her sensitive horn away from Luna’s soft fur coat. Twilight giggled as the softly shimmering mane of stars billowed up and past her snout.
“Hello Twilight, sorry if my entrance was a bit… abrupt, but I had forgotten to undo my spell.” Luna blushed a minute amount as she approached the table, looking over both the sprawled out forms and the small but precise list of materials. “This is for those ‘probes’ she has going through our sky? I must admit, their presence is a strange sensation, one I am not yet used to. Does she really need more?” Twilight nodded, pushing aside the forms she had been filling out to reveal a set of notes she had been keeping on what they knew so far, it was still rather sparse for her liking.
“You can read over these if you want, she still hasn’t told us how she got here.” Twilight passed the notes over to Luna. Luna paused as she looked them over, turning her head towards the window, and then back to the notes.
“Twilight, you say she has the ability to, ‘leave the planet?’” Luna motioned upwards.
“She calls it ‘FTL,’ according to her, she uses it to get between stars. She refuses to tell me What it is, but it isn’t teleportation. There is a spike of magic before and after, but rather than the magic coming from her, it seems that magic is flowing back through the world where she was. It’s like the magic is trying to fill the space where she was.” Twilight motioned at the notes. “She used to do it faster, but now she takes an hour to do it, she says that she has to take that long for safety reasons.”
“You continue to keep an eye on her, I’ll continue my surveillance from above. Do you think she has noticed me?” Luna glanced again towards the window, a jitter running down her leg. She’d wondered about, even hypothesized about, the existence of alien life, but never had she seriously approached the idea. Yet here she was, her stars had birthed life outside of what she knew.
“I don’t think so, she didn’t act any different after you had arrived.” Luna looked contemplatively over the list of materials.
“We can’t give this to her for nothing. We are supplying her with materials she needs, we deserve something in return. Press her for information. If she continues to be less than forthcoming, you should remind her of this fact.” Twilight blanched, looking with uncertainty towards Cadance. “You have a duty to protect Equestria from possible threats, Twilight. If we can help her, I’d love to help her, but we can’t go into this blind.”
“Luna, if she’s telling the truth, then there are a lot of people that are in trouble. I don’t feel comfortable delaying their rescue. Every day we wait… what if, they are in danger, or are in danger of starving or dying of thirst?” Cadance stepped forward, raising Twilight’s worried face with a hoof.
“Twilight, the more we know, the better we can help her. How can we help her save her friends if we know nothing about them?” Twilight glanced back towards Luna, her face didn’t lose its worried look, but solemnly, she nodded.
“I don’t think she’s a threat, but I understand.”
It's all cool, man. You may want to leave something here for the folks wondering why they got an email, but I'll wait for you to finish before I read it.
The ship designs are pretty cool, too.
No Twilight, dont go down the electrical route when you have atomic manipulators and broadcast crystals to hoof. Its a pity really. All she needs is someone in the School trying to make models of vaccuum tubes using sharpened pins and find mention of strange stepwise behaviour and signals jumping gaps like they wernt there and they could bypass the silicon age and go to quantum plasmonics almost directly.
I thought Twilight would actually read the forms and work out the internal structure of the request system, then on telling Athena, effectively inform her that her so called secure request system, is actually a wide open Wolfpack hack?
7846242 I didn't understand a word in that second paragraph.
7846226 Glad you liked them, I plan on doing a carrier next. Gonna be a "Chitose" class carrier.
7846226 Welp, congratz. Your words inspired me to get off my seat and finish it! I hope you like it.
Sci-fi and ponies? My favorite! I'm interested just on the premise of this.
7846250 then I pity you. primitive
7846250
Basically Booster is saying that he was expecting Twilight to look at the request system and tell 'Athena' that the 'secure' system was really wide open to anybody with a knowledgeable enough understanding of internet and intranet security. As far as I can understand.
Having not even read the story yet - this talk has gotten me interested to do so.
But I thought Twilight liked paperwork?
7846617 It's far less relevant than I would like, in that I wish the story was relevant to that.
7846889 I'm glad you enjoy it. I'm actually hoping a commision I'm getting of her ship shape gets done this weekend. The hardest part will be the superstructures.
7846242 Wait... who is "Athena?"
7846838
Oh no, you aren't scaring me off that easy. I'm too crafty!
I've already read the first chapter, you see, and thus I am hooked.
And on that note -
It'd just be a millisecond. Singular. Sixty eight thousands of one, to be more precise.
7848725 Mind telling me... why? The millisecond thing. I doubt I can ever understand why anyone likes this directionless crap.
7848725 wait, do you mean "Thousandths" or "thousands?"
7855775
Whenever you are measuring something using decimal places, everything to the left of the decimal is a whole. So in the case of milliseconds, as in the story -
- 1.0 = 1 millisecond.
- 2.0 = 2 milliseconds.
Everything to the right of the decimal place is part of a whole.
- 0.1 = 1 tenth of a millisecond.
- 0.01 = 1 hundredth of a millisecond.
- 0.001 = 1 thousandth of a millisecond.
So by that logic.
- 1.1 = 1 and 1 tenth of a millisecond.
- 2.1 = 1 and 1 tenth of a millisecond.
- 1.01 = 1 and 1 hundredth of a millisecond.
So for the number '0.068 milliseconds', the plural is wrong. That isn't multiple milliseconds. That isn't even a full half of a single millisecond - which means it is blindingly fast. I mean really the best advice I could ever give for something like this would be not to go into hard core numbers, but that's just my personal preference. It lets you clean up the language and pacing of the whole thing and then leaves you more flexibility as a writer so that when the computer takes longer or shorter than previously you don't get nerds like me complaining about the lack of a mention of her getting a processing power upgrade or downgrade.
7858568 sounds like decent advice. I'd have to find out the processing rate of the brain first and stretch it lower if I wanted to do this right. The idea was that due to the nature if her bits biological or no, she only pauses for the moment between "cycles" or whatever they are for the brain.
7859820 this is a good story. I really like the content. AI reacting to silly/outdated organics is always A+
7859820
One of the best studies has the human brain running at an estimated 38 petaflops.
That has the meatball in your head running trillions of operations per second.
And that's an estimation because we still don't fully understand just how the brain works. But suffice to say that right now there isn't a computer or whole data center with enough, powerful enough, servers anywhere in the world to run that sort of computer right now.
So like I said, I'd stick away from concrete numbers in this case. Especially if your basis is something that the modern scientific community still knows so little about.
7861065 I love how a "flop" is a unit of measurement.
Im too sleepy to respond to the rest of it.
7846226 Did you ever get a chance to read the finished version?
7867414 fixed
7867530 she tried doing something she's never physically done before. She nodded. Might rephrase this.
bad joke about how sometimes "magic" is spelled "magick." And stipulating that "magick" is just especially evil and base "magic."
Aurora's habit of referring to ponies as "the <pony name>" is very cute. I think she needs to meet Cherry from Gazing to the Ocean of the Sky so that the two of them can swap adorable non-land-pony language quirks
7868022
7867989
No problem! Happy to help
7861385
Got to love science.
7868349 Dunno if you noticed, but I updated 3 of my chapters.
I like to think that the only way for her to get these materials to her machine shops is to pass them through her "cargo bay."
Then Applejack or someone opens a door to find Aurora slowly munching her way through a pile of raw ingots like they're chocolate bars.
7868557 Thought about it too.
7869786 keep reading. All will be explained.
Just re-reading and pointing out typoes. Interesting how this story is developing. I wonder if Aurora is overestimating her ability to be fooled. She seems confident that these ponies are too primitive to pull something on her, but she's also wielding paperwork like a desperate shield against socializing. It seems that she might not be as capable of obeying her own regulations as when she was in her element, as a machine designed for that purpose. I'd love to see her just... forget something stupid, and then be completely confused what happened because she didn't think she was capable of making such a mistake.
7869974 Looks like every single thing you pointed out was a mistake on my part... but not this. Viking in the original sense of the word was a verb, and was originally said as "go a viking."
7870195
it sounds better as "they’d crawled out of the classics as textbook cartoons" "textbook ______" is an idiom in english, and in general putting the adjective after the noun is more characteristic of french than english.
7872830 But the point is that the "Classic" is what the textbook is about, and the "Cartoon" is the medium of the textbook. It's not a "Classic Textbook of Cartoons," it's a "Cartoon Textbooks of Classics." I was trying to imply that the "Classics as Cartoons" is the name of the textbook she is referring, from which you can infer that it's a textbook about the classics in cartoon format.
7870200
No ship was intended to survive to literally the last man, and keep operating.
No ship was intended to survive and keep operating to literally the last man.
No ship was intended to survive to literally the last man, not one that kept operating.
No ship was intended to survive to literally the last man, not without massive system failures.
No ship was intended to survive to literally the last man, not one that wanted to keep operating.
No ship was intended to survive to literally the last man, not if she wanted to operating.
it's just "and" is a conjunction, so it connects clauses, but isn't part of a (negatable) clause itself. I suppose in theory the boolean logic "nand" could make sense, but almost nobody would understand it, because boolean logic is weird. Such a "not and" would imply that the ship was intended to survive to the last man, as long as it kept operating.
not survive | keep operating | NOT AND
1 | 1 | 0
1 | 0 | 1
0 | 1 | 1
0 | 0 | 1
that second to last row works out to true, "if not not survive, and keep operating"
7872893 think I've fixed it. Not sure though.
7872976 The more I have to explain a tiny correction, the less likely it is to be important to correct. Whatever you do will work fine.
7872889 Oh, I thought it meant "It crawled out of the Classics," and then you specified, "As textbook cartoons." Just put in quotes, or italicise the book title, and it should be clear you mean the Classics as Cartoons textbook.
7873127 Eh, makes sense. Any chance you know Icelandic?
7873218 I didn't even know Iceland had their own language.
7873276 I'm currently struggling against the wall that is the fact that I do not actually speak Icelandic, kind of just ad-libbing and googling things as I go along.
I'm just sticking with the "Jomsvikings" as it is for now, since I can be a little more metaphorical with the ranks/reference more outdated rank names and just say that they just changed the rank.
OF1: Fänrik
OF2: Kertilsveinr/Kertilsvenja
OF3: Skutilsveinr/Skutilsvenja
OF4: Stjórnsveinr/Stjórnsvenja
OF5: Skipstjóri
Is kind of what I have so far. It would really help if I better understood out to decline nouns.
7878448 Eh, unlikely but not impossible. I was more worried that I had written two different occasions where it had happened. I think it's kind of allowable to have two out of thirty or so collide when you lose twenty. Unlikely but not a statistical anomaly. I might reword the second part to be more reasonable, or more explanatory, like, the collision had been in the area where her orbits all cross and where the most satellites are at any point in time. (aka, the animated thing I posted with it as a visual explanation since I had trouble finding the words to do it justice.)
just finished reading this fanfiction, at least what is written so far. Really fun fanfiction. The only thing that kind of stuck out to me is that actions or sometimes comments were seemingly random, because there was not enough dialog to describe what was happening in some cases. The newer chapters seem to be good though.
Cheers to waiting for the next chapter.
7881602 Oh? that's interesting. Mind giving me a few examples? Glad you enjoyed it.
7881787
alright, I'll read though it again, maybe this weekend, and see exactly where.
7881813 ?
7895419
patience... I did not get around to it because I did a bunch of car fixing instead. I just found out yesterday that this saturday work is calling me in for computer training something-or-other too.
soon™
7895794 cool beans. I actually hope to have the next chapter out by then... hope.
Congrats, you just hit the feature box. Prepare for the wave of readers.