Post-Equus arrival, day 121
17:38 hours, Canterlot Standard Time
Bridge, Caprica
“Mr. Wind Burst?”
“Yes, Captain Frude?”
“Take us down.”
“Aye, sir,” the Second Lieutenant said as he spun back toward his console. A few command prompts later, the Caprica was on a course to a large clearing just outside of Ponyville. “We’re on our way down, cap’n.”
Mark reached for the microphone. “All hands, for the next hour or so… brace for turbulence.”
Atop her castle, Twilight’s vision focused on the western horizon and to the clearing where the Caprica would be offloading her crew. A part of her was tense with the excitement of being able to see the ship comparatively sized with her surrounding environment. The other part was fearful that such a behemoth was soon going to be hovering over her small section of kingdom and subjects. Twilight had told the community of Ponyville what was coming, knowing full-well they were still a panic-y lot.
And I’ll never understand why, Twilight thought as she gazed down to the gathering crowd of ponies at the clearing. We used to have about one disaster per week. You’d think they’d expect it by now.
A twinkle on the horizon focused her thoughts. “Guards,” she called out to the two pegasi posted at her door. They entered her chamber and joined her on her balcony. “It’s time.”
“Firing bow thrusters to reduce speed,” Wind Burst called out. Mark watched as their forward velocity fell rapidly. “Three hundred… two hundred… one hundred… fifty… we’ve arrived over the target point.”
“We’re holding steady,” Des reported as she read her own holographic readouts.
“Very well,” a tired Mark said. He picked up the shipwide broadcast mic. “All hands, make your way to the loading bays. As soon as the loading pads hit the ground, do try to clear off quickly. Welcome home. Caprica Actual, out.” The bridge began to clear as the staff moved to exit.
Spitfire stopped when she saw Mark not joining them. “Aren’t you coming, too?”
“No,” he answered. “Gotta keep a dangerous creature like me contained.”
She gave a disapproving sigh, before fluttering up and giving him a quick kiss. “Call me, if you get lonely.”
“I will,” he said as she turned to leave.
Twilight watched from the ground as the great spaceship loomed ominously above. The gathering was relatively calm, comprised mostly of family members anxiously awaiting their family’s reunification. A loud clank was heard, and the princess saw the lifts begin to lower. Three minutes passed before they finally reached the ground, the ponies moving to step off and run to their waiting loved ones.
She looked for Mark, but saw he was nowhere to be found. The lifts began to retract, as Twilight spotted Spitfire, taking flight to meet her in air. “Was he not coming?” she asked when she caught up to the pegasus.
“No,” Spitfire replied. “I think he needs some time.” The two mares hovered and watched as the Caprica retreated back into the evening sky.
The funny thing is I have bsolutely no clue what is going on here.
I'm loving the story, it's brilliant. I wonder if it's the end, though...
5559552
No worries, there's still a whole lot to come before the end
And to Lunar Soldier, since I didn't have the chance to do my editing beforehand again: Just how fast was the Caprica when the bow thrusters started up? I imagine most of the re-entry speed was already dealt with, but it still sounds like the crew would have to deal with a bit of inertia. Depends on what you see as "rapidly falling velocity".
On a related note... Do I read that right and the Caprica can hover in place? Because damn, you need a bucking lot of energy to do that for extended periods of time, constantly fighting gravity. Being able to do that would have many advantages, for example slow re-entry or taking "geostationary orbit" at any flight height. Targeting just became a whole lot easier.
5559672 Well, it would cost a shit load of energy unless they have some kind of anti-gravity system...
5559772
I already started argueing that no, it would probably need the same amount of energy, but you're probably right. Keeping an object from moving can be easier (for example by placing it on the ground, which costs no energy at all and certainly keeps any movement away). However, if you want to change the height you're at, you will have to pay the full energy for that, anti-gravity or not. That's mass times gravitational acceleration times change in height (m*g*h), plus any inefficiencies you might have. Anti-Gravity will not be able to break the preservation of energy. And I still have a feeling that any kind of anti-grav-drive wouldn't be cheap to power, even if it might be cheaper than even highly efficient thrusters.
5559808 The Caprica is a big ship...it will use a lot of energy but it will be much more energy efficient then what we have today. That anti-gravity drive thingy is to let it hovering above the land...and in my opinion, it is much more efficient then using tons of thruster to keep the thing afloat...of course changing attitude will have to use thruster... and I am thinking of something along the line of those 3 battlecruisers in this video at 1:00 mark when i think about hovering...
5559843
While this is certainly a work of fiction in a setting that involves magic, I feel like I should at least cover some of the physics that would relevant in reality. First off is Newton's third law, the one about equal and opposite reactions. When you are sitting on the ground, there is no work being expended to counter gravity, because the forces are equal and opposite, but in order to do that, there must be a reaction between two masses. You could hypothetically hover a magnet above another magnet without expending work, because the reaction is happening in the magnetic field. (However, Ernshaw's Theorem shows that a body cannot rest in stable equilibrium in any combination of magnetic fields, so some energy will be required to adjust the magnetic fields dynamically.)
Thrust is a force, not an energy. Force multiplied by distance is energy.
Anti-gravity will have a set of very serious problems, depending on the way it is portrayed. Anti-gravity that induces repelling work will break the law of conservation of momentum, and allow you to build world breaking relativistic weapons. Kinetic energy is relative to the square of the speed, and the big problem with any reactionless drive is that the speed changes depending on the frame of the observer. There are frames of reference where the energy expenditure will end up being negative.
The other portrayal, as a sort of gravity faraday cage, is problematic because are a vast number of gravitational forces acting on any object, from all objects in the visible universe. An object that ignores gravity will not hover over the ground, but will probably rocket off into empty space, no longer attracted to the galactic center, or the Shapley Supercluster, or any of the other gravitational forces.
5560859
Et Al:
It could be some type of mass (and thus inertia) dampening field combined with highly efficient thrusters - this would make sense as, otherwise, how do you accelerate an object of any mass to (or past) light speed?
5562251 You don't, nothing with mass can reach the speed of light. With a translight drive of some form, you push yourself through space without interacting with it, your ship gains no velocity whatsoever.
5562251
I admit, I do enjoy discussing physics as it relates to science fiction, but there are often times when it is necessary to ignore the man behind the curtain and roll with it.
As 5562445 said, there's really no way to accelerate faster than light. From the reference frame of an observer that is shining a light, the light will always be traveling away at the speed of light. It is also quite likely that no one will ever be able to produce a workable way to move anything without any reaction. (The alcubierre drive of recent fame, for example, requires the existence of negative mass to function, and so far we have no reason to suspect such a thing is possible.)
It is actually even worse, because in reality, if you did find a way to go faster than the speed of light, you could easily end up creating a closed time like curve. You depart from your origin, travel some distance, and then return before you left. Goodbye causality. Of course, in Equestria, they literally have magic and time travel, so you can always say a wizard did it.
5562445 Yeah I read something about that sort of thing somewhere...You don't make the ship move, you bend space and time to change your ship position...thus "never interacting" with the environment and not breaking the E=mc^2.
Not quite as easy to understand as "You have point A and point B on a piece of paper. You fold those two points together and now point A (the ship) is directly placed on point B (your destination)."
5560859 I called it the anti-gravity "thingy". I'm not sure how that will work in real life...Will we be able to discover such technology? To have the ability to adjust the affect of gravity on an object (or a starship in this case)...because that will make a big impact on scient...
5562702
5562445
Exactly - it would shatter the concept of relativity, not to mention causality (or, at least, our perception of it). As far as we know today, it is impossible!
But, then again, there was a time where mankind thought heavier than air flight was impossible... so who knows what we'll discover down the road :)
5563931
I don't think anyone who ever witnessed a bird in flight would have been able to positively claim that heavier than air flight was impossible. Conservation of momentum, on the other hand, has been experimentally verified to within one part in 1e15, and no exception has ever been found.
5564392
Regarding "the wizard did it" I thought of Twilight reversing Gravity for herself and Spike. It's never said just how insane the required amount of power for that is, but at least Twilight didn't have any problem doing it, and if we go down the road of demystifying magic, we're at least able to say that in Equestrian physics there is a way to manipulate gravity significantly.
Doesn't help the Caprica's case though, since it is not built to work under Equestrian physics. But if they upgrade the ship with magitech some time in the future... oh boy.
Another thing on "different physics": It's actually kinda surprising the Caprica works at all. The way I see it, the differences should make any technology (and, technically, also any life) from our universe just fail. Classic physics appear to be working in the same way... until you think again. Without the ponies applying magic, nature would simply stop! Or at least that's what ponies seem to think. That Celestia and Luna need to controll the sun and the moon supports it. I'm not sure what conclusion I should draw from that. Maybe that classic physics as we know them don't exist at all and everything is just magic?
It gets even weirder. Remember Daring Don't? The girls were worrying that, if Axelwhat'shisname won, the sun over that Valley would never set. They ignored that this sun should be under control of Celestia, and they ignored that Equestria should suffer eternal day as well. It was only ever that valley and its sun. I got the strong vibe that we were dealing with two different suns there... which is beyond Pinkie Pie insane. The episode was nice enough to also tell us where that valley actually is: Just north of the Crystal Mountains. It was quite a nice place up there, with all that jungle right next to the frozen mountains.
Anyway, the point I want to make? None, I think. Just rambling about how the entire premise of anything coming from our universe to Equestria is flawed in itself and thus makes discussions about our technology there entirely useless. If taken at face value, it wouldn't work anyway :-P
5564392
True enough - that doesn't preclude the possibility of there being a way to do it that we simply do not know of.
I rather like Clarke's three laws:
1) When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.
2) The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.
3) Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
5568493
We might also all be brains in a jar somewhere, living a simulation that we believe to be reality. It is entirely possible that tomorrow, the universe will turn upside down, black will become white, and gravity will push away instead of pulling towards. I wouldn't hold my breath though. Barring the universe drastically changing without predictable cause, the correspondence principle is going to require that any new theory also give the same results as the old theory, in situations that have been observed by experimentation.
Arthur C. Clarke was an accomplished author, but I would wager that the majority of scientific discovery comes from looking into areas that do not behave according to our predictions, like the orbit of Mercury with respect to Newton's laws or motion.
5568687
Eh, fair enough :)
I still look to the future though :)