noise."Lost at Sea notes · 11:38am Oct 30th, 2017
First, a big thanks to Georg for pre-reading, and to Conflicting Views, DarkEven, and thatotherguy, for helping with French translations.
Some of y'all might remember back in Silver Glow's Journal when she was talking to the tornado team and told them about Cloud Climber getting lost in a storm and them getting a letter from Prance six months later.
Her total time adrift was five months or so; I figured that it would take her a little while to recover from her ordeal, and also a little while for the letter to get back to Chonamare.
And by pure coincidence, it was just in the news recently that two women were rescued after five months at sea.
Obviously, a few things are required to survive for an extended period in the ocean [or anywhere else, for that matter]. You've got to have food, water, and shelter. Assuming you have those, than there is no hard limit for how long you can survive.
Surviving at sea is particularly challenging for two reasons. The first is fresh water. If you haven't got that, you will die in fairly short order.
The second is a boat. Once again, if you haven't got that, you're not going to last very long.
Honestly, those first two things are probably the most important when it comes to survival at sea. You'll die of drowning or thirst before starvation gets you if you haven't got a boat and fresh water.
In this regard, pegasi are uniquely suited for long-term survival away from any conventional resources. It's canon that they can shape clouds and sit on them, which is actually even better than a boat, which can be capsized by waves or sunk in a storm. A cloud can be floated above the water, keeping it clear of most marine hazards.
Canon doesn't say if the pegasi can actually drink from a cloud (or if it does, I don't remember it), but it stands to reason that they could. Assuming that Equestrian clouds are somehow made of water vapor, that implies that pegasus magic can affect water vapor, and condense it into cloud form . . . and it's not much of a stretch to suggest that they could condense it further, if needed.
Plus, over the ocean, you're pretty much always going to have lots of water vapor to work with. I don't know exactly what the evaporation rate is, but it's a lot. The Great Lakes evaporate 820 billion gallons per day on average. Or, expressed another way, they evaporate one Hurricane Harvey's worth of rainfall every ten days.
Her cloud-perch also gives her the advantage of being able to more easily spot fish.
Supercells are the king of clouds. A hurricane (or cyclone) might have them beat in total energy per storm, but one supercell can totally ruin your day. Their downdrafts have brought down commercial airliners, and they can spit out two different kinds of lightning. From the base, the rather mundane lightning that we're all used to (only 300 million volts) originates, and that's something we humans can harden our machines against. Positive lighting is six or more times more powerful, and can easily reach over a billion volts, and to my knowledge, nothing man made can survive that.
If that wasn't enough, supercells are the clouds that produce tornadoes, the fastest of which is estimated to have had wind speeds in excess of 300 mph. They are also one of the few types of stormcloud which isn't limited to traveling in the prevailing winds.
They also stretch way up into the atmosphere. The very top of them often breaks the troposphere: 70,000 feet (21,300 meters).
They're the kind of cloud that even a pegasus would fear.
The merpony language was Frisian. I was actually considering using a mermaid language, figuring that somebody had invented one (and they have). Then I thought about using a language from an Atlantic island, and while I was looking to see what kinds of languages Google Translate knew, I accidentally stumbled upon Frisian, and since that was sort of a horse pun, I went with it.
Wikipedia helpfully tells me that Frisian is halfway between English and Dutch, and indeed, the language does look sort of similar.
Auvergne and Ariégeois are both French breeds of horse.
A lot of the other details—most of them, really—came from a childhood and adulthood spent reading sea stories of various types, from the classic adventures like Captain's Courageous to true stories like Their Finest Hours. I probably can't really pin one particular detail to any specific story. I can tell you that one chapter title came from an Alistair MacLean collection of short stories, and another came from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
this looks to be vary interesting. and the art work rocks.
This is a great story, and I had totally forgotten the Silver Glow reference. Really enjoyable
It's pouring now as I read the final chapter and epilogue. Pretty fitting, I guess?
I vaguely remember Silver mentioning that pegasi could actually be in danger if they got lost over the ocean and couldn't find clouds nearby to rest on... but couldn't they also use the moisture to condense their own? It probably wouldn't last very long, but it might allow them to alternate using their wings and using their cloud magic, to avoid straining either.
Edit: Wait, you also mentioned that further below.
Hm. Assuming that pegasi can form clouds from water vapor, condense it into fresh water, and catch fish, there seems to be no reason they couldn't live on the open ocean almost indefinitely!
(More edit: I hadn't yet read the story. Can't wait to, though; this was one detail from Silver Glow's background I always wanted to see more of.
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Once you start getting into Gigavolt power, theres no wonder antimatter spews out. Electron pair production starts at megavolts, and you can start getting hydrogen at 4 Gev and above. Never mind Xrays, gammas, and everything else that comes from the LHC injection accelerator.
One of my high school teachers was a big burly biker-lookin dude. He told us a story about the Rime of the Ancient Mariner. While in college, he had an exam on the whole story. Apparently his whole class partied hard instead of studying the night before - including him - but in the morning, he showered while listening to his Iron Maiden cassette tape. They actually have a song called Rime of an Ancient Mariner. He popped that tape in his Walkman and [I like how Walkman was automatically capitalized for me] listened to it over and over, then aced the test that morning. The moral of the story is: heavy metal music can actually be educational, go figure.
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Thank you! I hope you enjoyed it (if you've read it)
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Thanks!
It's probably not the only thing that Silver Glow mentioned that I'm going to expand upon, sooner or later.
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Yeah, I guess that might help set the mood. What you really need is a good thunderstorm (at least for the first few chapters), but you can't always expect the weather to cooperate.
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I presume pegasus cloud magic isn't an inexhaustible resource, although canon doesn't say.
If a pegasus who got caught in a storm could get above it (probably the weather below it would not be conducive to cloud-making), she could ride it out on top, and then do like Cloud Climber did. I think the biggest danger to the coastal pegasi was probably getting blown out to sea below a storm and not being able to fly to a place of safety before exhaustion set in (Silver Glow occasionally mentioned when she was on storm patrol that it was worse because she wasn't allowed to fly above the clouds). Getting exhausted and crashing into the sea, or getting disoriented and crashing into the sea would likely be the end of a pony. There's also a chance of getting hit by positive lightning, which would almost certainly kill them outright.
Potentially, they could. Assuming that they were able to find enough food that had the right nutrients, there's really no reason why not. In fact, I wrote one story premised around nomadic pegasi, who just drifted around on a cloud, although they stayed over land.
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it is on my list and i hope to get to it soon.
after my surgery i have gotten behind on things around the house and i have a few parts now so i can start putting my diesel back to gather.
i can say the DANA 50 ifs is vary easy to work on, i wish i had the cash to throw a locker in it.
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Never mind what we pathetic humans can do; the energy in storms is mind-bogglingly insane. I read somewhere that a big hurricane has essentially the same amount of energy as a Hiroshima-sized nuke exploding every minute.
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Hey, whatever it takes to remember something. I've learned a lot of useful facts from writing ponyfics, and strangely enough the best explanation of personal liberty vs. law I've ever heard came from a ponyfic.
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Or a better example, the Dinosaur killer was over a milion times the energy of the entire planetary nuclear arsenal detonated in the same place at the same time. So even if we wanted to divert it, we would have to have the whole momentum transfer occur 30 years ahead of impact. With installation, transfer, launch, planiing and detection times on top of that.
And that rock was only medium sized. or small relative to asteroid belt. Barely th size of Red Dwarf.
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There was light thunder and lightning but the downpour was really pouring. The kind where you get completely wet with a raincoat.
But yeah, it would have been really good if it happened when I was at the first few chapters.