SPAAACE!!! · 11:03pm Oct 2nd, 2014
Stories about space have always been my cup of tea, but with this show, it is soooo hard to think of a good way to include it.
Of course you can always cheat and just have humans arrive and show them the way to interstellar travel, but, let's be honest, when you look at all of this site's space travel stories, it becomes very hard to find a story not involving humans.
Thankfully, there is another cheat you could use; distant future. The only problem with this is, basically everyone is dead... That's kinda a big deal if you were planning to include more than just the princesses and Spike. (Thankfully Twilight is a princess, so that works for me!)
Onto the next cheat! One could also have Equestria discover ancient tech that allows them to travel FTL. However, this is the point in which people would try to have this tech be developed by a long extinct race of humans, and that just falls in line with the first one.
And lastly, you can of course use crossover. It gives you a reasonable plot, but pretty much destroys all originality. So yeah, it's kinda a tradeoff. I'm not saying you can't make a crossover original, I have seen it done before, but good luck.
So, hypothetically, if I were to write a space travel story, it would be pretty different from what you might expect. Instead of these massive warp engines, I prefer a more particle and realistic method. Have you ever heard of Project Daedalus? It was a proposed starship design that was powered by nuclear fusion. The same stuff that powers the stars could one day power our ships that we use to reach them. It's kinda poetic really. Anyways, this ship would only be able to reach speeds near 20% of the speed of light, and that's just frankly unacceptable for a story.
The ship I would write about would be able to approach 99% the speed of light, using a combination of the "Bussard Ramjet" and Daedalus. Instead of zipping from star system to star system, the ship takes decades to reach it's destination. Thankfully, because of relativity, the time elapsed in between stars would take days to a little more than a week at these speeds.
(For science babble about how the ship works, continue reading, if not, skip to next paragraph.)
Basically, the ship itself can only reach 5% the speed of light on a full tank of deuterium and helium three. The trick is to have two shuttles of decent size that can use a collapsable magnetic scoop to pick up hydrogen along the way, then, with the initial speed boost from the original ship, return and dump the fuel. Why not just use the original ship and put a magnetic scoop on it? Hydrogen beyond the any solar heliopause is quite scarce and it wouldn't be as efficient, especially when trying to approach and reach orbital velocities of a target star, since you would be burning in the opposite direction in which you'd pick up the most fuel. Also, if the ship were to run into anything while still traveling at relativistic speeds, a three kilometer scoop would be much easier to hit than a 200 meter reenforced shield. Not to mention, shuttles could maneuver more easily to collect larger accumulations of hydrogen. However, they would only do this in order to reach these velocities upon entering and exiting a stelar system. Simply put, after the burns to get up to speed, the ship is constantly running on empty. This would also make it easier to speed up and slow down since less mass would be easier to control.
So here's a basic idea.
It's 200 years in the future, and Equestria still has no shortage of magical catastrophe. With each easily having a shot at sending their world into oblivion, Princess Celestia decides the best action she can take to ensure he nation and specie's survival, is to expand it to new, safe worlds. Princess Twilight, always being a strong supporter for the advancement of science and technology, couldn't be more pleased with the news. That was, until she was informed she was chosen for this 150 year mission. She of course accepts, knowing she one of the few ponies powerful enough to protect the ship, but begins to have trouble accepting that the world she is leaving behind, will be nothing like the world she returns to. She only hopes the same isn't true for Spike.
In my Shadow Wars continuity, Equestria has to fight and win a Lensman Arms Race with the Night Shadows over the 24 years since the Return of Luna. This is helped by the rediscovery of a vast store of information from the Age of Wonders as refined by three thousand years of Ponies in an alternate timeline, which is converted into actual production by the appearance of an immense supply of cheap sapient labor in the form of the Changeling Worker castes. In a quarter-century, Equestrian technology advances two centuries -- the Final Battle sees the Earth fielding fleets of nuclear-powered interplanetary space battleships against the foe. After the victory, this shipbuilding capability is converted to give Ponykind the Solar System.
With the ensuing cultural disruptions.
A space Spilight sweet