Oct
11th
2016
Points of Canon: S6x24 - Top Bolt · 1:26am Oct 11th, 2016
Let’s see what they brought us this time…
- This episode explicitly postdates Newbie Dash, seeing as how it starts at Wonderbolt barracks and Rainbow is not even much of a newbie anymore.
- Once again, weeks are mentioned.
- Rainbow just had “spring training”, explicitly dating this episode to the end, or at least a latter half of a spring. This activity took Rainbow away from her friends for a more extended period than normal, and the list of activities she is looking forward to now includes Daring Do with Twilight, drinking cider with Applejack and a sleepover with Pinkie. We know nothing about the latter two, but the first one sounds suspiciously like the events of the cold open of Stranger than Fan Fiction. Depending on how long the “Wonderbolt emergency” cited at the end of the episode took, and whether Rainbow actually had more than one free week or not, it could occur right before that. And there’s that idea that this emergency is actually a prank…
- Spitfire admits to loving yelling and blowing her whistle.
- This is a Cutie Map episode, so it also has to post-date Spice Up Your Life where the Cutie Map is fixed. It can’t predate The Cutie Re-Mark since Starlight is in attendance at the map.
- I wonder what kind of attendance patterns Rainbow is actually expected to put in at Wonderbolt HQ now. So she has a week or more off in this episode. What about all the others?
- Rainbow Dash is suddenly, finally, famous. Or at least, instantly recognized on sight by all the trainees in the squad, all of which are absolutely new ponies. This implies promotional materials and a bunch of shows, all of them somewhere other than Ponyville.
- Apparently, as series progresses, Rainbow prefers hovering to standing more and more. And she was caught indulging in hooficure in Applejack’s “Day” Off. I wonder, are her hooves okay?
- Rainbow uses an invisible pocket to get an air horn out of it. Yup, limits of cartoon resolution.
- Sky Stinger set a record for the “fastest vertical acceleration rate,” 500 feet in 2 seconds. There’s something odd about that phrase on the level of a Kessel Run in ten parsecs. Assuming this is speed would produce a speed of 274 km/h, which is decent for a piston engine aircraft, but that’s not acceleration. Assuming that this is acceleration anyway, and instead of saying the word “squared” like she should, Vapor Trail means that he reached the speed of 500 feet per second in two seconds, he accelerated to 548 km/h, which is bloody good for a piston engine aircraft and causes about half of them to fall apart. This would be an acceleration of 76.2 m/s2 or 7.77g. Which would just about max out a human without special protective gear. Probably within reason for a pegasus, but it’s no wonder the guy’s braindead if he does this sort of thing all the time. It is a record, so regular pegasi don’t fly anywhere as fast or accelerate as quickly most of the time anyway.
- Twilight’s “lesson” implies that wing angle actually does factor in air resistance. So pegasi have to obey at least some laws of physics. However, the stuff Vapor Trail pulls is far beyond simple “gusts of wind” and has to be magical in nature. Later in the episode, Sky Stinger is almost incapable of accelerating without her!
- …which makes me wonder how is it that he didn’t notice. They must be completely inseparable.
- Sky Stinger and Vapor Trail come from a place called “Stratosburg” (sp?) which is, paradoxically, not a cloud city. Possibly, a mountain plateau of some sort, but not a cloud city as such.
- …So what could cause a sneeze to be valued as “best?” Yeah, it’s cute, but still.
- Vapor Trail uses “sugarcubes” as an expletive, and the way she says it, starting with a “sh” rather than “s,” makes it quite obvious what she actually wanted to say.
- Training by flying with weights. Obvious, of course, but not a given.
- Cloud shaping is clearly on the list of pegasi powers, but here we see it on a rather large scale. Seeing as how it’s part of the test, it’s a common and required skill, or at least, doing it fast is.
- Twilight uses a very interesting chemical wind generator device. I am not aware of any chemical process that can readily produce gas quite like that, particularly not breathable gas, so I expect the mechanism is magical once again. Actually, this would make an interesting rocket engine, even if it relies on the second reagent being present in the box to work…
Amazing, a Wonderbolts episode that doesn’t make them look like jerks… well, mostly because they are absent for most of it. :)
It's 4am, I've got a sore throat, I'm generating a constant stream of snot, and I just spent an hour reminding myself how integration used to work all those years ago so I could check your maths (which are, of course, correct). You, sir, are not good for my health, but you are good for my mind.
Given how cider is usually pressed in the fall, if Dash is looking forward to it after spring training... Well, Tiny Pop may have banned the wrong episode.
I had similar Kessel Run thoughts about the acceleration record, but I hadn't thought to assume an unspoken "per second" after the five hundred feet. Thanks for doing the legwork I never bothered to.
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Rainbow also uses the word “make.” I expect this involves a distillation apparatus and what they’re actually going to be drinking is Applejack’s namesake.
When car acceleration is discussed, you will often hear people say stuff like “a hundred in X seconds” – meaning “accelerates to reach 100 km/h in X seconds” and not “moves 100 km in X seconds.” There are equivalents of this word usage for miles. 500 feet per hour is obviously ridiculously low, so it has to be per second, and as far as we know, the “feet” ponies use are at least roughly in scale with ours.
But it’s bloody fast, if true. The acceleration is quite high, and pegasi have to be extremely resilient to blunt force trauma in general, unless the reason most pegasi seen don’t have obvious families is because half of them lie dead in a ditch somewhere.
I pronounce “sugar” without making a drawn out “h.” :)
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Oh, and another sudden thought. This gets us a lower bound on the speed required to produce a Sonic Rainboom.
Rainbow and Twilight are impressed at the acceleration given, but obviously, not speed itself. Which means that Rainbow can go faster still, and gives credence to the idea that Sonic Rainboom requires breaking the sound barrier – which, for low altitudes and reasonable temperatures would be 1234 km/h. Just a bit over twice as fast as this 500 feet/second speed yardstick.
That probably isn’t all that is required for a Rainboom, though.
I thought "sugarcube" was specifically an Applejack countryism, so I found it interesting that it apparently has a more widespread usage than that.
Dang it, I missed another Points of Canon post until after everyone else! Gotta figure out some kind of email notifications thing...
AHA! I see I've arrived in the nick of time to begin the shrunken equus inquisition! So Rainbow Dash wanting to read Daring Do with Twilight and then actually getting to do that (I agree, that emergency at the end was just a prank) would be the opening of Stranger than Fan Fiction.... However, Twilight Sparkle explains that she can't head off to to Daring Do convention that suddenly popped up (which we learn at the end Daring just threw together to use her fans as an equine shield against Caballeron), because Twilight needs to attend the big Friendship Summit in Griffonstone.
Now, that Friendship Summit has been widely cited as driving the significant improvements in Griffonstone that caused it to look like a decent working city in The Fault In Our Cutie Marks, after it looked like a pile of garbage in season 5. So does this tell us that The Fault In Our Cutie Marks must be after Top Bolt? Maybe.
Unless Twilight is even worse at spotting Starlight spying on her than I remember...
Great question. Rainbow Dash was there for "spring training," maybe she doesn't normally have to stay long enough to miss her friends? Like the National Guard reserve, she puts in 1 weekend a month and two weeks a year and spring training is her two weeks?
Or: Rainbow Dash is a soldier, no getting around that. Twilight Sparkle is a princess with zero royal guards in a town with no police or military, with the two most powerful, valuable magical artifacts in the world that have both been targeted by trespassers. Has either Spitfire or Twilight made it so that Rainbow's main assignment is Ponyville, perhaps even being the head of Twilight's "Royal Guard" on paper?
Does Rainbow still do wonderbolt shows on occasion, or not? If she does them regularly, she should really be at base training more often. If not, how is this different than when she was in the wonderbolt reserve?
Perhaps hovering for her is the equivalent of that guy who carries a little barbell around so he can always be doing reps?
And was achieved only with the magic of two ponies combined.
If Vapor Trail can do this without Sky Strainer noticing, wonderbolts have to be able to combine their magic in shows, right?
Am I crazy, or was the ship teasing unbelievably strong here?
Looking on the map, I nominate the Smokey Mountains, which have small, unnamed towns on their peaks.
Zecora and Apple Bloom need to start making rocket fuel potion.
Ehh, except for Spitfire, who admits she loves yelling at new recruits. I mean, I get why you need a drill sergeant at boot camp, but the fact that she loves doing it doesn't make her look that nice.
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Given that in the previous episode it was established fresh cider spoils immediately, but we also saw cider get stored in crates for shipping...
I assumed it was feet per second per moon.
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The supplementary materials, in particular the Wonderbolts Academy Handbook which I investigated previously, treat the Wonderbolts squarely as part of the army, and Wonderbolts are patterned after the Blue Angels all the way down to the color scheme. But since about the only thing settled canonically about the regular army of Equestria is that the Wonderbolts are part of its air force and Pinkie would get drafted together with Maud in wartime, we can’t really decide between those two based on canon alone. Our only evidence is indirect:
Wonderbolt barracks contain more beds than there are Wonderbolts.
Rainbow did actually get famous enough to be recognized by every trainee – and since most of them are apparently from Stratosburg this year, she had to have been there with a Wonderbolt show.
In Newbie Dash, she would regularly return home, rather than sleep at the barracks.
Idea: Wonderbolts are normally free to run around as they please, provided they attend the flight routine practice sessions and the shows on time. If pegasi can sustain 200-300 km/h, it really isn’t that much of a problem to commute, with a small Equestria. However, occasionally they’re required to put in training for the military part of their duties – close air support operations with ground-based troops, covering paratroopers, bombing runs – during which, they operate like they would in wartime, i.e. out of the barracks on the airfield.
Notice though that this was impressive to Twilight and Rainbow, but not implausible. And not being able to do that nearly made him ineligible for Wonderbolts.
Which is why I think that most pegasi can do sustained 100-200 km/h, except maybe Fluttershy, and those that are considered “good” routinely fly at 300-400 km/h.
Of course. Otherwise, there would be far less need to put such emphasis on teamwork.
But of course. :)
That does look like a nice place for it.
P.S. Random idea: Pegasi using JATO for its intended purpose. I.e. they wrap their legs around a barrel-y solid rocket motor, spread the wings, and fire up the motor, then release it when it burns out. They have some pretty complicated fireworks and very good chemical industry, so this should be trivial, and for airship-based pegasi squadrons it would be very tactically useful. And bigger airships can use a mechanically powered trolley accelerator…
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So they commute to the airshow part, but need intensive training for the military part? That makes a lot of sense to me.
First off, I'm not sure if you're European or Canadian, but those kilometers might as well be moons to me. Some pegasi can certainly fly super fast, at jet speeds, but I don't know about "sustain." Sustain as in fly that speed for hours to and from a job every day?
On the other hand, if Pegasi could commute to work across half of Equestria, then it helps explain why they are practically non-existent in Canterlot and Manehatten, the two places with the highest rent/property values in Equestria (probably).
That's awesome, and it solves the issue of what Pegasi who couldn't "sustain" themselves at that speed use to travel long distances. Heck, a pegasus could grip one in her legs while resting on a cloud if they wanted to be really lazy. I can definitely see the military applications, combining high ground and blitzkrieg in one.
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Strictly speaking, neither. Just think of me as an alien, it will be easier. :)
Quick mental calculation: Halve kilometers to get something approaching miles.
More precise mental calculation: A kilometer is 60% of a mile.
Quick precise calculation: Google’s search string will react to queries like “200 km/h to miles/h” and convert units for you.
For more complicated queries, there’s always Wolfram Alpha, which is usually pretty stupid in terms of understanding speech, but you can do a lot of fancy mathematics quick with it.
Should I use nautical miles? At least these are the same the world over. :)
Yep, that is precisely what I mean. The speed cited here is actually better than the maximum rated speed of your average 1939-1941 fighter, and pegasi apparently accelerate better than most heavy jet aircraft. Suppose they can do it for an hour without being too tired to do anything else afterwards, and they can commute to work from like 50-100km away easily, which would make it the next town over at least.
They commute to work from suburbs, where they get to live in low altitude cloud houses, naturally.
Not so much; assuming a standing start means that 500' in 2" is perfectly meaningful acceleration-wise. It's unusual, but not nonsense (though I've seen plausible explanations of the Kessel Run parsec thing.)
Which would double your number of assumed acceleration, assuming constant acceleration (and, without that assumption, more than doubles).
I'm mostly just disappointed nobody's jumping on this wing-assist that wonderbolts don't seem to do (and don't even notice?) as a way to increase the top end of performance…nor calling out Sky Stinger's record as assisted.
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Oh, hey, they called it cider when they refrained all last episode, too.
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I assumed spicing, myself.
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Stinger.
But you'd think Spitfire would notice, were this a thing they did, hence my conclusion that they don't (and disappointment that they don't decide to try it out)
We're arriving at opposite conclusions with the same data. What assumptions are clashing?
Maybe you figured this out on your own in the interim, but I would assume this is Stratusburg, named after stratus clouds.