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// Prologue: A Brief History Lesson 
// Story: Friendship Drive Charging... 
// by Connie Spaceplone 
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I am Connie. Connie is short for "Constellation XT class". I am a heavy freighter developed and manufactured by Neighkon Spaceways. 
My function is to transport large amounts of cargo across interstellar distances and provide companionship for my pilot. 

The technological advancement that eventually led to my design began with the pioneering spirit that drove ponykind to settle on planets other than Equus.

Ponies unfortunately were not fit to live in these alien environments, and it took a long time and lots of hard work for these colonies to become self-sufficient. 

Many colonies relied on constant supply shipments to remain viable until they could make it on their own. 
And even then, trade, migration, and tourism boomed. Of course, there was no shortage of ponies willing to lend a helping hoof in supplying these colonies. 
Some did it for material gain, but even for them, the joy of bringing happiness to these pioneer ponies and the gratitude and hospitality they received in return was usually the real profit. 
This high demand in space transport led to ship crews becoming smaller and smaller until one pilot per ship was common.
You can mass produce ships, but you cannot mass produce crew.

The shift from a single-planet economy to a multi-star system economy led to great innovations and technological leaps. 
This happening in the field of ship drive technology is obvious, but ponies also made great innovations in sciences and technologies required for facilitating and planning the trading where  direct communication was impossible. Such as long distance data transmission, data storage, and artificial intelligence for helping with the planning of trade routes. Application Specific Integrated Circuits for things like solving the travelling salespony problem became items available at any general goods store. 

However, even with ship speeds approaching the speed of light and even exceeding it by small factors, journeys between colonies still took weeks, months, and sometimes even years. 
We realized too late the toll the continued isolation would have on the pilots.
Not only is friendship an integral part of pony society, but ponies also cannot function without companionship. 
Irritability, paranoia, substance abuse, visual and auditory hallucinations, loss of appetite, depression, and self-harming behavior are just some of the symptoms of the disorder that became known as the "friendship-scurvy-complex".

The obvious and desirable solution would have been to have ships with a multi-pony crew complement again. But that would have required replacing every ship in service with one that is designed for multi-crew. 
With the recent innovations in artificial intelligence, it was believed that updating the ship's computer software with one that could give companionship to the pilot would be a quicker solution to the crisis that required urgent action, buying the ship manufacturing companies more time to design and develop new multi-crew ships. 

The first few iterations of the shipboard AI only had moderate success. The Responses that the AI gave were often repetitive and really showed the 'artificial' part of their intelligence, but they eased the symptoms of friendship scurvy by being able to monitor the pilot's mental health and give advice. 

The true breakthrough in artificial intelligence arrived only when researchers split the AI into multiple processes and gave the consciousness process a view of their environment that was filtered by other processes that emulated desire, inhibition, and even fear, along with the injection of fuzzying into the thoughts of the AI. This effectively created an AI that had a conscious and a subconscious, and the ability to experience true emotion and friendship. 

The resulting AI architecture had four properties that made it sentient:
one: Bicameralism. The mind was divided into conscious and subconscious
two: Iterative self-observation. The thoughts that the mind had a moment ago were reused as sensory input the same way other senses were perceived.
three: Emotions. Based on what the mind percieved and what it knew, the subconsciousness injected desires and inhibitions as sensory input.
four: Adaptation: Depending on whether the actions the mind took were successful in achieving desires and avoiding aversions, the neural models adapted to produce different emotions in future experiences.

This software upgrade was rolled out quickly and soon afterwards, every newly designed ship came with such an AI as standard. Also included with each ship of this new generation was an "avatar", a normal pony sized version of the ship designed to represent the ship and make interactions between the ship and crew even more natural. 
The sentient AI program was so successful that the effort to replace all existing ships with multi-crew ships was demoted to a much lower priority, and now even new ships are still often designed for a single pilot. 

The introduction of friendship-capable AI on starships had a side effect that was even more significant. It led to the most revolutionary invention in propulsion technology to date. The Friendship Drive. 
It was long known to ponykind that friendship is an extremely powerful form of magic, perhaps the most powerful of all.
But the introduction of the magic of friendship into a starship made superluminal interstellar travel more accessible than anypony could have predicted. 

Unlike the already established warp drives, the friendship drive gave ships access to an alternative sub-region of our universe where space is compressed and distances are smaller - completely bypassing the need to accelerate beyond the speed of light. 

The friendship drive not only accelerated travel in an unprecedented way, but also transformed ponykind into a truly multi stellar civilization.

As such a spaceship, I have traveled much, and have quite a few stories to tell.  Allow me to share some of them with you.