I was bored today.

What did I decide to do to ease the boredom?  Use some simple math to apply real-world physical values to the actions of a fictional character, of course.  Isn’t that what everyone does when they’re bored?

Those of you who are familiar with my “Shipping and Handling” story universe probably remember Watt, the earth pony electrician with near-boundless energy.  

Watt’s uncanny speed and hyperactivity were attributed in the story to the simple fact that he is regularly jolted with ludicrous amounts of electricity while working at the apparently highly unstable power grid at Ponyville dam’s hydroelectric plant.

But how much energy does our friend Watt actually have?  To determine that, let’s make a few assumptions and use a couple of physics constants.

Warning: What follows may not be entirely accurate or account for every variable.  So if you’re a physics buff, just try to ignore any inaccuracies.

Let’s assume, for the sake of this argument, that a pony is equivalent to a horse, and therefore at any given moment can achieve 1 horsepower.  (Or, in different terms, can expend 746 Joules per second of energy at a maximum level of activity, since 746J/s = 746W = 1hp.)

Now, one watt is much smaller than one horsepower, but let’s not forget that our Watt is just a nickname for the character in the story.  His full name is Kilowatt Hour, and a kilowatt hour is equal to 1000 watts x 3600 seconds in an hour.

Now, 1 kwh = 3.6x10^6 J, or 3,600,000 J.  But because of the fact that pony names typically match their abilities eerily well, let’s forego the whole “per hour” thing and assume that our pony, because of the fact that he has the unusual ability to store electrical energy in his body and convert it into mechanical energy, can have up to 1kwh worth of Joules to expend per second, much as our typical ponies have 1 hp (746J) to expend per second.

If we do the math, 3,600,000 divided by 746 gives us a result of about 4826.

This means that when “fully charged”, Watt has 4826 times as much energy per unit of distance or speed as the average pony.

BIG OLD EDIT RIGHT HERE: In the initial version of this post, I forgot to account for the fact that the kinetic energy is 1/2mv^2, so apparently that means Watt actually moves about 65ish times faster than a normal pony, but reaches that number if and only if he has enough electricity to convert to mechanical energy currently in him to do so.

Now, once again for the sake of simplicity, we’ll assume that a horse is equivalent to a pony.  According to Google, thoroughbred horses have an average maximum speed of 35 mph. (Some can go faster, of course, but this is just the average).  If we set that as the average maximum land speed of a pony in Equestria, that would imply that Watt, (ignoring horizontal forces like static friction between his hooves and the ground, as well as air resistance), can travel at up to 2275 mph.  

During the scene in Watt’s bonus chapter (in the bonus content following “Shipping and Handling”,) when Watt allowed himself to be supercharged with a massive amount of electricity in order to basically turn himself into a projectile to defeat the spaceponies, we can assume he was traveling at or near this speed. (Except that gravity and mass and stuff come into play when he moves vertically, but I’m not gonna go into that.) On a typical day, when he is storing only the energy from less intense shocks, his maximum speed is probably only a small fraction of that.  Even so, moving at only a few percent of that speed would be more than enough to appear to be moving almost instantaneously from place to place, from the perspective of the average pony, assuming Watt's only traveling small distances at a time.

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In other news, I’m taking a summer Physics course at college, which is why I haven’t published anything lately.  You couldn’t tell, could you?

~PRB