• Member Since 21st May, 2012
  • offline last seen Mar 19th, 2020

The DM


Dungeon Master (DM) - the organizer and participant in charge of creating the details and challenges of a given adventure, while maintaining a realistic continuity of events.

Sequels1

E
Source

The nation of Equestria has been exploring their little slice of the universe for some time now. From launching probes into deep space, to landing ponies on the moon. Sending things beyond the grasp of their planet has become almost routine. However, with every mission into space, there comes a time when the voyage must end. What happens when Equestria experiences the end of a voyage that they didn't begin?

Updated and Revised on October 5th, 2014

Chapters (3)
Comments ( 670 )

Funnily enough, I was just looking at your stories page, and thought, "I hope he publishes Voyage's End"

4642911
It got approved 43 seconds ago

.................... Now I want a full story on this damit.

4642959 So much THIS!

4642914

Okay, I just got to reading it, and.... wow. Very nicely done. But do I smell a SEQUEL? I hope I do.

4643034 doubt it. this was supposed to be a short little fun thing

4643034
4643080

Who knows. There might be.

Did you sit through the 5+ hours of audio on the golden disc before making this fic?
I tried to listen to it myself but I got bored, after 7 minutes.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ELnn9V01EiI

4643144
Not quite. I only listened to the parts that I needed to for the story. Most of the spoken audio is just greetings in a couple dozen languages. The rest of the audio are sounds of Earth.

While this is certainly an awesome idea, the execution is a little herky-jerky.

The pacing is on speed and Celestia felt slightly OOC with her dismissing Twilight's theories.

But beyond that, it was pretty good.

4643218
Yeah, the pacing was kinda hard to get right. I wanted it to feel tense, but still doable within the two hour time span of the story. I was afraid of drawing things out unnecessarily, and in doing so, made it a bit too condensed.

Well, you gave me a moment of panic/confusion when the relative velocity of the spacecraft to the probe went from 700 to 710. "Gah! Aren't you supposed to be slowing it down?!"

Brilliant story, and idea.

4643263
Thanks for the catch. Fixed the wording to better reflect that.

Wow... this managed to get featured. Never thought I would see the day.

A sequel would be cool.

This was great. I would be interested to see a sequel, but only if it doesn't seem like it was forced.

4643429
That possibility won't be for quite a while. It will only happen if I can muster up a story that doesn't fell like it was written at gunpoint.

4643435 And stories written at gunpoint rarely turn out well.

4643100 Here let me fix that sentence for ya.

Who knows. There might be.
Yes.

4643443 Yes, blood all over a computer screen doesn't help.

I'll get around to this fic soon. I can't resist me some good old realistic space fics.

It’s dark grey hull was only given shape by the thousands of light sources that ran across in long broken bands.

Its

Excellent story. Short, but now one of my favorites on the site.

Aerobraking? Voyager? In a pony fic!? Great to see that the fandom has its fair share of space enthusiasts :yay:

4643565
You should have seen all the math we did for this story.

Rate of Deceleration in a friction-less environment was the big one that took three and a half hours on its own. Totally worth exploring physics and orbital mechanics

Very nice, but I found a couple of very minor things you may want to edit.

The unicorn next to you in Golden Hem.

Excelent. Has the probe shown any changes?”

Well done. Yes, they really did go all out with the Voyager records. Though I can't imagine where it'd be in 37,000 years.

4643581
Thanks for the catch. Fixed

4643570

Were you using Kepler's laws for your deceleration calculations, or did you go for one-dimensional kinematics?

So Earth got wrecked by... something. It took some 37,000 years for the ponies to get there, and if humanity ruined things around today the planet would bounce back by then, so something happened 'recently'. Anything from one or more thousand years from now wouldn't be humanity, due to the rate at which our tech is pacing in that time 'ruining' Earth would equal 'blowing it up', so it couldn't have been humans.

I want to know what happened to Earth.

4643590
I believe we used one-dimensional kinematics.

4643607

They are THE MOST useful equations aren't they?

:twistnerd:

**input theme from 1980's movie "Spacecamp" here**:twilightsmile:

Equestria ships are small... Compare to Earth ones at least. That's what I learned.:rainbowlaugh:
And so, the first interstellar ship comparision has been made.

4643624
made writing this considerably easier. Kept me from having to make up believable numbers.

Some sciency nitpics.

The probe should accelerate as it enters Equestria's gravity well, not decelerate.

It's pretty much impossible to see a planet because the star it orbits is too bright.

If the probe is traveling faster than the shuttle, it shouldn't fall into a lower orbit.

4643666
When the planet was viewed through the telescope, the colors they were seeing were along the lines of what you would see when looking at Mars. Just flashes of those two colors without any features.

but yeah, otherwise spot on. Though it does depend on where the object is in its orbit

This story was amazing and it actually made me cry at the end.

4643752 and me (an editor), and the author's mother (literally)

4643758 it makes everyone cry. Or almost everyone.

Haiku of the excellent story:

Discovered a gem
Though hid from our eyes til now
Morning sun reflects

Your muse is being kind! Ouch! So much for climate change.

It's nice to see real, honest to god quality make it into the feature box. Thank you, and well done.

To think that this may be a possibility for the future of generations. To have another form of life find this golden disk and, maybe, attempt to find our little planet. Whether they're in peace or not, that's definitely not happening in our lifetime.

Normally, I'm not very attracted to stories that hit the featured box. There are few that have made me try to read them, but I tend to not be interested. When I saw this, I decided to give it a shot, because it didn't seem like some attempt to gain more fame or something (I'm being broad here). No, this is different. It relates to one of the biggest things mankind wants to find: life beyond our solar system. We've found planets, stars, black holes, galaxies, etc etc in search for life beyond us or for other scientific discoveries. With this story, Equestria experiences a probe enter their little slice of the universe that has spent 37,000 years in space when they're just starting to discover their own sense of wonder.

I don't know what to feel, personally. I want to say I feel amazed, or perhaps some sense of joy at the outcome of this story. That sense of wonder that Twilight must have felt when she encountered new life, the life she has worked so hard to discover, must have been just perfect. While I may not experience that wonder in the future, the thought of future generations maybe experiencing it excites me, personally. I'm not a very avid space guy, but I'd like to think that the universe is a wonderful place, and so is this little fanfiction.

As much as I want to see more, perhaps it's best we let this story's voyage end, too, hm? Where one voyage ends, another begins. Let the mind interpret what might happen next and leave us with the sense of wonder and excitement.

If I've repeated myself, I'm sorry. But this story is just beyond most of the stuff I'm made to read through approvals and stuff I have read willingly. This really deserves its fame. Continue writing.

4643570 Space isn't exactly frictionless, but for the story I'll roll with it. bravo btw.

For the record, I am not chiding or belittling your story. It is (IMO) one of the best shorts I've read on here. Since you did the effort for the math, I thought I'd toss in some info you might appreciate. Just a conversation point, not arguing with the story. Suspension of disbelief and all that.

Everything from space dust to (and I'm not kidding here) photons can have a physics altering effect on a probe. NASA was playing around a few years back with the idea of using high output lasers to put pie pan sized microsats/reflectors in low orbit. Obviously they haven't but the physics backed it up. *shrug*

Oh, and at 37,000 years of travel any probe would still be in the just past theOort Cloud. Voy. 1 just hit the heliopause this year.

It will pass Gliese 445 in about 40k years though, so perfectly fit for where the ponies are.

Awesome chart (courtesy of NASA, but stolen from wiki btw) It is a logarithmic distance scale though. I can't seem to find the parameters used, but it is great to show the distances.

upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/PIA17046_-_Voyager_1_Goes_Interstellar.jpg

teesd.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/TheBattle.jpg

4643808 hm. Interesting. What exactly is this Cloud?

this was a great story,

4643841 Nothing has ever been out there, but the running theory is that it is cosmic debris, planetesimals, the occasional comet orbit, and random space crud/gasses/ices at the every edge of the solar system. The far edge is considered the boundary of the solar system.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud

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