The stars were made to be explored, were they not?
That's what Princess Short Flight believed, at any rate. You never know what you'll find out there- and who knows, maybe the legends were right.
Maybe there really is a world called Equestria out there, just waiting to be discovered, and maybe it really does have magic on it.
And maybe, juuuust maybe, her civilization wasn't the only survivor of the ancient apocalypse.
A rewrite of the once-maybe-popular Just Like Magic of Old, this story will be taking over the Monday publication slot... when I have chapters. No guarantees, for a few weeks at least.
And as always, tags may be updated as the story progresses.
Oh, and before I forget: Thanks to my editors, the usual Gerandakis and this time also one of my siblings.
Expensive, deadly, and could be a lot better designed.
Shouldn't they look for the Elder Princess first? Ensure that she is safe and all?
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Yes... but the Admiral is taking care of that. Well... when she's not getting shot at. Unfortunately, they didn't really have "recover Little Bubble" as an option. Flight's accepting defeat... and spiting her father.
Oh boy! Short Flight is having one hell of a ship built! This is basically a Normandy themed ship isn’t it? Get close with stealth and then unload massive amounts of firepower onto your target.
Love the chapter! And I’m curious as to what the ship looks like!
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I’ll have to say, I’m not familiar with Normandy…
But yes, I wonder what it looks like too. Probably something like a cross between the Space Shuttle and a fighter jet?
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It’s the Ship of the main character you play as in the video game series Mass Effect. Lovely ship. Good game.
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…. Ahh. Yes, her ship is a glass cannon with some pretty damn impressive stealth capability. I mean, 500 kilometers away from a navy isn’t far!
That said, when she’s polarized her hull in “antistealth” mode, the produced magnetic field is about ten times as far across as the Earth…. I don’t know about you, but that’s some seriously powerful magnets.
Holy....this is reminds me a bit of the previous story Just Like the magic of Old and Stars Beyond the Veil with themed between them! I seriously can't wait for the next chapter!
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I suppose it does, doesn't it? The Distortion Drive is the driving technology (pun fully intended) for the main plot of the story, after all... I just chose a less, uh, ridiculous way for her to acquire it. Just like it, I have plans for her encounters with the thestrals and with the pirates... and both of them should be a little less contrived/random than last time. And of course, a little more interesting...
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Maybe getting a crew and the Distortion Drive would by less contrived/random, but how does magic return and the Navigator Necklace become found? Are you thinking of those two event also a result of the Distortion Drive?
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Well, this starship they've found has survived in a tumultuous asteroid belt for time out of mind, so presumably there's something protecting it...
Oh, the navigator necklace? Yeah, that's getting removed. It made things just too easy, and made other plot points I wanted to hit virtually impossible. Just because, well, they couldn't get lost in space... Well, now that's possible. And they've got (or will have) the ship to handle almost anything they find out there!
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So it's got a forcefield or something up? Damn. What the hell kind of reactor is powering that ship?
Based on observations, the Big ship that Short Flight is trying to have built sounds like it's measured in kilometers. and going by estimates on the specs for her personal ship, i'd say it'd be around a Kilometer in length if not a bit shorter. And with firepower like that onboard, I doubt that much would harm them even if they got lost. But that Flagship... It might be Civvie, but it's got enough hidden weapons to wipe out a fleet in an Alpha Strike!
Although, if the Navigator's Necklace is thrown out, then doesn't that mean the Old Ship would need the coordinates to Equss along with a star date? Otherwise the ship would need to know the near exact modern spatial coordinates or they would be useless due to Galactic Drift.
Consequence: You can't see out the sides of the ship.
Hold on. 10^-3 rounds per minute per day is the same as 10^-3 rounds per day per minute, so it should take 1000 minutes to spin up from a standstill to one revolution per day. That's a lot less than a week — did you drop a factor of ten somewhere?
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This is correct. There are probably ways around that, such as varying the interference zone and peeking out the gaps produced- but it would still vastly degrade sensor accuracy.
For the other thing... Possible. Actually, definitely, I miscounted the zeroes. A ten-thousandth.
please don't abandon this story i can't speak for others but generally only comment on things i find wrong with a story, but in this case i have to say the story is great !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
https://images.app.goo.gl/XJqq3rm3DLmXT89y9
You do what you feel is right. I love how this story is going, but I never really thought of committing. I don't have much time to read so I usually don't comment. I did this time just to say their may be fue of us reading this but we can wait longer for new chapters.
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Yeah... According to the statistics, each chapter lately has been getting around 75 views throughout the week. I don't know how many of those are from people viewing a chapter multiple times, and it's likely that some 3 or 4 of them are me... but a "view" only takes about 5 seconds to count, so there's no telling how many of them are false detections- including my own views- and how many aren't.
I mean, only 41 people are tracking this story... to the 350 and 106 of Accidental Invasion (just over a year old) and Gift of Divinity (went live- and got featured- 5 days ago).
Sad to hear you're dropping this. It's hard to find good, well-written sci-fi stuff.
Confirmation that there is no relativity in this universe. At these speeds, the Newtonian velocity subtraction formula, v1 - v2, gives a very different answer than the relativistic formula, (v1 - v2) / (1 - (v1 * v2)/(c*c))
But even in a Newtonian universe, wouldn't you expect the projectile's initial velocity to be based on the velocity of the ship that fired it?
I don't tend to comment on things much. I only comment when I feel I actually have something to say; maybe several things. (E.g. the relativistic observation above.)
But it's also true that I haven't been enjoying this story as much as I enjoyed JLMoO. I'm having a lot of trouble figuring out why, though, so I unfortunately can't give any useful advice.
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You would expect that, yes. They're in a Newtonian universe... with a fixed speed-of-light cap. Anything that tries to violate that speed of light, relative to nobody knows what (probably "the nearest celestial body" or some extrapolation from the same), will be violently decelerated... Unless it is using some sort of tech that allows it to violate that top speed. As such, even if her ship had been traveling at 0.95c, the weapon would still have only fired at 0.99c. In this case, since she was moving 0.75c, the actual relative difference was 0.24c, but thanks to the speed of light... I probably miscalculated- 0.12c relative appearance would've been if they were stationary with that actual difference. Since they were not stationary, the appearance was probably closer to the actual difference, since the relative speed of the light they're seeing from it is 1.75c, albeit still slower than it actually was.
Now, had she been traveling at 0.75c in reverse, the weapon would not have been traveling at a full 0.99c... probably closer to 0.55c, a whopping 1.3c relative, as it hit the maximum accelerative capacity of the weapon. I haven't actually defined that capacity, except that it's over 1c and less than 1.75c, so who knows.
As for standard artillery cannons, of the sort that were fired at her? Their accelerative capacity is around 0.9c, but the round- being designed to detonate on impact, before it can smash itself to bits- is a lot more sensitive to space dust & debris in between, so it has a maximum effective velocity of 0.8c... which is enough to afford its target a usable amount of time in which to detect and avoid it, even though it'll look- to their sensors- like it's travelling at a whopping 4c! ... Assuming they're stationary. The math is complicated enough I'm not going to calculate the actual apparent speed of the artillery rounds as they charged into their teeth at 0.75c- probably something like 16c, which would explain why she only had a few seconds warning... and indicate a very impressive sensor suite to have spotted and ID-ed the round fast enough to avoid it.
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... Well-written sci-fi, huh?
My focus lately has been on Harry Potter crossovers (a lot more fantasy than sci-fi)... but thanks for the compliment. I also like sci-fi, even if it's also an easier category to walk into a corner (because you can't just say "magic" and introduce some new mechanic to explain it).
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I mean, you sorta can with ponies in the mix. Magic to manipulate physics and whatnot, but... I see your point. Doing that kind of defeats the purpose - And yeah. You'd be surprised how often people resort to stupid tropes, or "magic" even in scifi stuff when ponies are involved. It actually gets rather frustrating.
I've definitely been reading most of your work. I've actually gone back and read a bunch of the older stuff too, even, so don't think it's just this that I've enjoyed. I tend to just not comment on stuff often.
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No problem.
…. That would be why I like the humans-turned-into-ponies approach (The Equestrian Starliner, The Equine Starliner) or the magicless-ponies approach (Just Like Magic of Old, Starbound Flight) so much: It takes magic out of the equation.
The First Equestrian Starliner was an exception, with magic ponies and a godship.
Hooray! Update! (Less hooray, cliffhanger!) Will be sad to see this sit, but it's understandable.
Hooray, update! Can't wait to see more of the pirates get squashed.
Someone needs to get Shadow Flight more bubblegum. Also, dealing with the king is going to be... interesting.
The pirates didn't even demand ransom for a princess. It says something about the king, something not-so-flattering.
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Yeah... And these pirates actually control the King, as revealed last chapter. That'd certainly explain it- it's almost like the attack on the Flying Surface had been meant to whittle down the Navy and reduce the potential for danger if some Admiral decided to go off on their own...
ah yes, the good ol' Mk. 0 eyeball, reliable as ever
well, there is something to be said for having your own upgraded sensor suite
Imagine how angry the king will be when he finds out what 'his' Navy has been up to while he wasn't looking. And how mad he'll be when he sees how much they spent while doing so.
Just checked on this story for the first time in a while.
When I read chapter 9 a while ago, I didn't notice the part about the "headaches". But reading chapters 10 and 11, I've noticed what's been happening. Looks like that feature of JLMoO just showed up later in this story!
But except for Little Bubble, I don't see any indication that the characters have noticed. Have they?
A few other thoughts:
Given that the first base they destroyed shone "like a second sun" for petameters around, you'd think the rest of the pirates would have had a little bit of warning?
I kind of had a feeling Princess Bubble was alive, but I wasn't expecting River Skip. That was a nice surprise!
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Oh, the rest of the pirates did have warning. Just not a warning they could effectively act upon.
A new chapter?! Awesome! Glad to see your out of deadlock!
I love how things are explained in this chapter! Showing why and how Equineothame is how it is. A twist I honestly never saw coming! I love it!
And the way the Enterprise is mentioned and how it came to be known is a lovely way to explain how the Distortion Drive was studied.
Keep up the amazing work! I hope your muse returns soon!
That was an interesting twist! And a surprising one, given that it wasn't in the previous versions of this story.
Looking forward to more!
“Princess,” she greeted calmly. “You’re alive.” She raised the gun and pulled the trigger.
That's not good!
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No, it's not.
... Chapter 13 has been stuck on writer's block for a while, sorry about that.
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No worries
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sounds as if she is making a Planetary magnetic field here?
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This is specifically the high-strength defensive zone, rather than the barely-detectable zone.
In theory.
In actuality? Sci Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale with vengeance.
I'm tweaking it for the rewrite... passively detectable "from the next system over", probably said facetiously. Really redefines "anti-stealth".
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so this is effectively screaming at the top of their lungs;
"Hay, I am here!"
though the scale feels as if it is a Planetary size field
Quite impressive I'd say!
Anti Stealth kind of comes out as a bit on the Tnkky side here, doesn't it?
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we're currently at 07/12 as it stands
and it seems the story is being worked on!
Clearly, one of the Hooves, descendent of Derpy.
..and I am all out of Bubble Gum
that's what happen when you kick too many asses
then again; "Carry on!"