July 1
I woke up in the middle of the night to the sound of a downpour and I had to go see it so I carefully climbed out of bed and put my muzzle against the window. And then I wanted to smell it, too, so I pushed the window up just a little bit and then pushed up against the screen and sniffed the air.
Behind me, I heard Meghan ask what I was doing, and I told her that I was watching the rain and so she got out of bed and moved her desk chair over by the window and sat down in it and I got up on her lap and we watched it come down.
I thought about going outside and playing in the rain, and I thought about turning on my radio and seeing if Mel or any of the other stormwatchers were talking and then I thought that it was the middle of the night and she had to get up for work in the morning so I got back off her lap and she closed the window and we went back to bed.
I dreamed about Harry Potter, which I guess shouldn't have surprised me. My dreams have humans in them and human things, and I wonder if that's happening to all of us. And if that's happening to the people who are in Equestria. Are they dreaming of ponies?
In my dream, I was Ginny Weasley's patronus, and she and the other good wizards were all fighting the death eaters and I was really scared but they were so hopeful when they saw me that I went towards her and then there was a big battle around me and then at the end of it I heard a mournful song and then when I woke up it kept on and I realized that it was a bird calling outside.
It was just barely light, but I was still a little scared from my dream so I huddled against Meghan and put my wing over her stomach and she twitched a little bit in her sleep 'cause I guess I tickled her.
Her just sleeping peacefully calmed me and even though I didn't go back to sleep, I felt the stress draining away from me.
I hadn't known before that her telephone lit up before the alarm went off, because it wasn't something I was normally looking at, but a flash of light from it got my attention and I'd just looked over that way when it went off and she moved under me and reached out to turn it off and then she set it on the pillow next to her and used her hand to rest on top of my outstretched wing and I leaned up and gave her a good morning kiss.
I felt her hand tighten on my wing and then she kissed me back and thanked God that it was Friday and there was a three-day weekend ahead.
Then she asked if Jeff was having a barbeque again tonight or if he was putting it off until the Fourth of July, and I said that I didn't know but I thought that he probably would and we ought to go.
Since we'd been talking, it wasn't so annoying when her telephone alarm went off again and I got off her and then she slid out of bed and I went to the bathroom and then let her have her turn for the toilet and shower.
I had enough time to go to the kitchen and get out the shredded wheat and set out the bowls before I heard the shower turn off and so I hurried back to her bedroom and was waiting with the brush when she came back in her bathrobe.
She wore jeans and a Kalamazoo College t-shirt because she said it was casual Friday which meant that she didn't have to wear clothes that were as nice.
I said that every day on cloud patrol was casual Friday.
When she went downstairs she was happy to see that I had already set out breakfast for us and while we were eating she asked what time she should come over and I said that she could come over right after work because I'd either be at my apartment or next door playing with the kids.
She helped me into my flight gear and I had her put my saddlebags on loose because I was going to take them off and drop them on my balcony as I went by.
We were both out on the front porch when the car arrived to take her to work, and as soon as she was in it, I took off and cut diagonally from her house to my apartment, dropped off my saddlebags, and then went South.
I kept low over town; I knew that I was flying near the airport's landing area and didn't want to make extra work for the airplane directors. But I was high enough that there weren't too many obstacles in my path, either.
The route was very familiar, and I swooped around my helpers' office, then over the 94 Highway and back down the other side and pretty soon I was in new territory for me.
I'd angled my course just a little bit to be over Westnedge Road, and all of a sudden it stopped, and that must have been the very southern border of Protage, because after that there were trees and two big lakes and one of the lakes had a parking lot right next to it which I'd learned meant that was probably public.
I flew over that and a little bit further until I came to a long row of circular fields, then thought that was a good place to turn around.
I knew that the 131 Highway was off to my right, and that I could probably fly high once I was on the other side of it, so I flew west until I found it and I was lucky that it was right next to a town so that I could tell the airplane directors where I was. I still had to fly around a little bit until I found the name of the town, though.
I got permission to follow the 131 Highway back to Kalamazoo, so I did, keeping to the west of it. It curved around a bit and there was a road that went straight that was next to it, but I was having fun so I just followed the curves all the way back to the railroad overpass and then I turned and dropped down so that I would be out of the way.
I was pretty hungry and thirsty when I got back to my apartment, and so I had a drink of water and some alfalfa and then I took a nice shower and when I had gotten done and my nose was full of the clean smells I went back into my living room and that's when I noticed that my flight jacket really needed to be washed and I suppose my bedding would need to be soon as well, but I didn't know where to do that. When I'd toured the apartment, I hadn't been shown a laundry room. So I would have to ask Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn.
I was going to need to go shopping soon, too. Maybe we could do that over the weekend, if stores were open. Since it was a holiday, they might not be.
So I checked the electric icebox and cupboards to make sure I had enough food just in case they weren't, and I did.
I had to go out on the balcony to add more seeds to the birdfeeder, and when I did I heard Trinity and Lindy and Caleb playing out in the backyard so I flew down to join them.
They'd put little metal hoops in the ground and were playing a game called croquet, and there was an older woman with them who Lindy said was their grandmother. She was certainly not expecting to see me, and she was a little wary at first but then Caleb reminded her that Jeff had mentioned me coming to his last barbeque.
Well, I could tell that she still didn't quite trust me, but she let me stay after Lindy and Trinity begged and Caleb said that I was cool, and I watched them play their game. I'd had trouble with golf and these sticks looked even more awkward to use, so I didn't join in, but it was still fun to watch.
When the game was over, their grandmother said that it was time to put the things away so that they could get ready for dinner, and I asked if they were having a neighborhood barbeque again and she said that they weren't and I said that was too bad because the last one had been a lot of fun and all the other neighbors I'd met had been nice and I think she took that the wrong way because she frowned and went back inside the house.
I guess some people are just grumpy for no good reason.
I went and checked my mail, and I'd gotten a postcard offering Jet's Pizza, which was the home of the turbo crust. I hadn't had one of their pizzas yet and I thought that I might want to, and the postcard had their telephone number.
I was a little bit worried about Gusty and Cayenne. Had my letters gotten lost? Or maybe they were just too busy to write back to me. I suppose both of them had lots of stuff to do now; Cayenne had her physics work and Aric was really busy with his play so maybe Gusty was busy with hers, too.
Before I could worry any more, I heard my doorbell and so I went down the stairs to let Meghan in. She had a bag with clothes in it so that she wouldn't have to wear the same thing all weekend, which she set by the futon.
I told her that Jeff wasn't having a barbeque tonight after all and so I didn't know what to do with the evening, and she said we could stay at home and watch a movie or two on Netflix and that sounded kind of lazy to me but I didn't have any better ideas.
We decided that we'd have pizza for dinner instead, and that we'd also have beer so the first thing that we did was go back outside and walk to Tiffany's and got some Bell's Kalamazoo Stout and then went back to the apartment and she showed me how to order a pizza online and then we sat down and shared a beer before the pizza arrived.
Then she showed me Netflix, which is a page on the computer that lets you watch movies if you have a password. I didn't, but she did, and so we pushed the futon around and she turned my computer screen and then she said that she ought to go to the bathroom before we got comfortable. Then she started to sort through movies and there were a lot of them. I asked her how many movies there were and she said that she didn't know but it had to be tens of thousands.
I wanted to know how you could choose what to see, and she said that you searched the same way you could on Google, and showed me how it worked, and so we picked random subjects to type in and it would come up with movies that were about that. And then I suggested Equestria, and she found one that she said she'd watched as a girl and hadn't seen since and that sounded like it would be fun to see, so she chose it and pretty soon it started playing, and she said she was really interested to see what I thought about it.
Well, I thought that the man who was talking hadn't spent too much time there because there was a lot of stuff that he got wrong, and she noticed that, too, because there were a couple of times when she started laughing at what the man said. But he got some stuff right, too, and sometimes I just kind of stopped paying attention to what he was saying just to watch the movie. He'd been places that I'd never visited and some places that I didn't even know existed. And we both got excited and pointed to the screen when he was talking about Ponyville and Aquamarine was in the background with a bunch of other foals. I wonder if she knows she's in a movie?
Gusty would be so jealous if she found out.
When the movie was over she asked if I wanted to see another movie and I said that I did and so she picked a movie called Flushed Away and then sat back on the futon and climbed in her lap and I noticed that she wasn’t wearing her bra and she said that was because she decided to make her Friday even more casual.
I thought that was a really good movie even if there weren’t really rat-cities in the sewers. Meghan said that New York City had alligators in the sewers, though.
She closed Netflix and shut down my computer when the movie was done, and then checked to make sure that all the curtains were closed before she got undressed and I folded the futon down into a bed.
Once we were settled, Meghan asked if I was looking forward to riding a horse and I said that it was going to be really weird but it felt like something I needed to do. And she said that there were things in life that were like that and sometimes it was hard to chase your dreams, and I said that I thought I'd done pretty well so far.
Meghan! You want to ride the horse too. Stop dawdling and just do it!
I don't know about you, but "Horse-Riding Pony" is SO a porn movie name
I want to see her reaction to 'Tangled'.
sudden shift to present tense
7531942
I want to see her reaction to 'A Serbian Film.'
What an odd coincidence that SG and the readers are having a 3 day weekend.
Gators in the sewers is more a Florida thing.
You're thinking of mutant turtles.
Can't beat the original comics, cartoon and movie. IMO, the 3rd movie is better than the 2nd. The 2000's cartoons are okay. Michael Bay's schlock is schlock.
I think we can all agree that is best magical manifestation of hope and joy, but second place isn't too bad, Silver.
Huh. I'm guessing she doesn't like ponies for some reason, though evidently not as much as that man in Walgreens. (Come to think of it, I wonder if Jeff will be as neighbourly if he finds out that SG is riding and/or nude-cuddling humans... or if he finds those YouTube videos the WWMT lady was talking about.)
For a second I was expecting her to find the cartoon series instead of a documentary, which would be hilarious. But I guess that the series doesn't exist here anyway.
I know Meghan is.
Silver I would recommend Jet's Pizza! A franchise open near me in the middle of the summer and it has become my family's go to pizza place. Definitely get the turbo crust, it really adds to the crust.
and some ponies keep breaking that rule every day ! looking so nice !
wow that end was loaded !
7531918 YES ! TOUCH THE
COWPONY, DO IT NOW !Most likely. A big part of our dreams are the recent memories that our brain is sorting. So after a few months in a new environment, I guess the environment would blead in the dream.
Although the opposite is also true, nostalgia and homesickness can bring dreams about the past too.
One of the and is in extra, I let you choose wich one you prefer to keep.
So I guess they literally watched Netflix and chilled.
Wow... So Equestria and Earth have been in contact for quite some time. Interesting little tidbit right there. I really want to see Aquamarine's reaction, if she doesn't already know.
7531931
Unfortunately the story has a rating to maintain, so there will be no pony riding, only horse riding.
And I just realized that I could swap Silver into one of my stories and have an explicit answer to some of the teasing going on around here.
With Earth horses you have to remember the size difference. It's like humans and Mighty Joe Young (IMO the best of the movies inspired by King Kong)
Sure, horses are supposed to be tame but they could anhilate an Equestria Pony and not even work up a sweat.
7532350 I'd like to see that... except it could detract from the experience to see how it's going to pan out in this one. Maybe latter.
And yes, not going to happen in this story, silver for one isn't leaning to do so. But, considering how long equestria may have been in contact, one does wonder how much did the porn industry change with it.
After Silver's Harry Potter dream maybe she should try her hoof at writing Fan Fiction, although it seems like she just went with a Self Insert there so points off for that.
7532398
Id like a Big Mac to go please.
With Relish.
Based on the ages and the film it sounds like the portal has been around for at least 15 years. I could see it happening at the turn of the century and freaking everybody out :)
7533170 At about the time of Y2K and the Rainboom.
7528761
If anyone's interested, here's that video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8RwY9iwEaSk
When Meghan says "when she was a girl" does she mean when she was a teenager?
Also, gosh darn it Admiral, stop teasing us with the worldbuilding ;_;
7534733
Yeah, I do that too. Of course, there's the odd time that I forget to charge my phone....
As to "Just how much do Ponies know about Hearth's Warming Eve ? (Or any part of their history)
IMO, it depends on "when are you talking about". In my mind, they had a really ancient period rising to unknown heights.
Discord came & wrecked everything. Even if he didn't destroy them directly, he messed up the weather to the point that agriculture was ruined. This would lead to their economic collapse.
Most older records were lost
Starswhirl the Bearded gave Celestia and Luna the Elements of Harmony & they stoned Discord.
Next, Hearth Warming Eve. At this time, the Unicorns raised the sun. The Princesses may have led some Ponies but clearly didn't rule them all.
As to "How much fighting was involved in everyone agreeing it was best for Celestia to control the sun?" Good question.
Another good question "How much was lost when Luna went Nightmare?". They probably have pretty good records of the last 1000 years
7534890
Apparently, due to the Scottish crew having done a combat show on Saturday, then driven 300 miles on Sunday, all the events took place on the Bank Holiday Monday, but I wasnt in a rush and so wandered in for the afternoon combat, apparently all morning had been taken up with 1v1 fencing style honor combat, no head, hand hits etc they broke for rest, recovery and lunch etc, then the half hour before the 5v5 all out combat started, the primary judge and the guy with the tent with all the weapons and dexriptions, gave a quick talk through of the types of blades, poles and armour and the relationships between them. Their evolution in fact.
The Scottish guys got wore out so much, that only one was left standing, and one of the other crew took him on to make up their numbers. Always painful to be stood over a hundred foot away, watching someone swinging a falcion down from verticle onto someone elses helmet. That, and since last year they implemneted an absolute rule, when it drops to 3:1, the fight stops instantly. There were a couple of scrum occasions last year that were painful.
This year, the closest event was when one guy, I think andy, the Scottish guy, got body checked by two opponants and went down, but too close to the heavy enclosure frame. 4*4 timber with a top and mid rail, fortunately he was wearing a complete helm with a rigid neck flange, instead of just chain mail collar, and the timber went right into the angle. I hope he is healthy long term as he was resting for a minute or so before getting up. Guys with HD video cameras and stabilisers were filming teh stuff for online, facebook etc uploading. Heritage Cup ?
I want to know if drilling holes to put power lines is so expensive, how can they cost it to drill holes for the far less cost return fracking? Given that requires enough holes to get a decent return on continous geothermal.
7534818
I've never actually met anyone who advocates tau. mathematicians, physicists, engineers, professors, students; they all use pi. It's just a really small minority that wants to use tau. Math purists using tau and engineers using pi is just a complication we don't need. we already have to deal with imperial/metric, we don't need pi/tau. And it's not quite as simple as that considering how ingrained pi is.
It probably won't be anything close to cost efficient. Essentially you charge the battery during the day in order to use it at night, when the sun isn't out. This is also when electricity is cheapest. Then you need a larger charging system (typically solar) in order to charge it during the day. This is also when you need power hungry AC systems. Net metering is also really lackluster when you actually get it. My parents just recently got partial solar and it doesn't do much. The rate they give you is the bulk rate they pay power plants, while they still charge you whatever you charge.
Plus batteries aren't exactly green. Lithium mining is pretty bad.
I still advocate nuclear, especially thorium MSRs. It's way cheaper and cleaner.
7535111 Nuclear isn't clean at all!
It cetainly is better then coal when it comes to CO2 emission, but the nuclear waste are something we don't have any solution for and it creates sites that will stay contamined for millions of years.
I prefer short term problem with other energy sources.
7535114 well, considering our current strategy is dump it in a hole in the ground. Which, by the way we don't actually do. Most places have to store onsite. Plus I specifically mentioned thorium. It's way less radioactive and its byproducts decay several orders of magnitude quicker than other fuels and it gets to the point where the byproducts are less radioactive than naturally occurring uranium ore fairly quickly. Not to mention that these byproducts can't be weaponized and you can actually extract useful stuff from the waste. Then Thorium reactors can actually burn existing radioactive waste as fuel.
Saying that it certainly is better than coal is a drastic understatement. Natural gas is certainly better than coal. Nuclear produces zero CO2.
Oh, if only those last two words were flipped... . One of the two of them needs to make a move already! It's college, college is for experimentation!
7534792
Not an electrical engineer, but a lot of lightning is actually between differently charged clouds, and never reaches the earth. You might not need your grounding wire to touch the actual ground to harness potential.
7535155 I did not remember much about the Thorium reactor, a quick check on wiki basically said two things:
-It is way more expensive and complex then the uranium reactor, one of the main reason while it is not in use
-While it those recycle the nastier type of waste, it still product some nuclear waste including some that will last for a few thousand of year. And it doesn't stop the site from being contamined.
It would certainly be better, but at this point hydroenergy, geothermy and wind turbine are still cleaner.
And yeah, dirty is the best way to describe coal energy.
Okay, so, I have been reading this fic the last couples of days and I’m totally in love with it. Seriously it’s amazing, AND. SO. CUTE. I love how you choose to keep the simple human-pony exchange as the central plot, because that’s honestly fascinating enough, without ulterior complicated plots, sudden villains or so. One may think even that of the narration of Silver Glow morning routine (flying, bathing) could be boring, but it isn’t!
Instead I just get more and more immersed.
Honestly it’s gonna be a shame having to wait for new updates now
Besides pony-human interaction, I’m an anthropologist at heart, and I’ve been always fascinated to know more about the culture in the United States. I’m from Argentina, but (as almost everyone in this era) I grow up watching american series, Hollywood's movies and american internet pages; it’s really cool to learn more of the US by a fic that focus so much in the everyday things.
I also wanted to say how much I like the way you make Silver Glow personality. For humans, she seems to be kind of naive, and a lot of people assume that; but I don’t think she is, she’s just a pony. She understands war, tragedy, violence, and sex; but at the same time, she believes in being nice, being affectionate, and helping each other, which are things that we consider “child-like”. Add the fact that she ignores a lot of things of earth and some cultural differences, and people thinks she is naive. But that’s just how ponies are. I love that a lot of times, Silver doesn’t say “that was bad” or “the good thing to do” but “that wasn’t nice” or “the friendly thing to do”. It shows a totally different scale of values.
Said that, there are some questions I’ve been dying to ask you. Probably some of them were already answered, but I couldn't read all the comments (a shame because some of them are super interesting), because, you know… 9500 comments…
So:
What the hay Silver Glow is studying? I never could understand how american colleges worked, and I can’t even fathom what kind of career requires poetry, philosophy, anthropology, climate science and advanced mathematics at the same time… she is just taking the classes that she like or what?
I was also really confused when SG was talking about “the end of the year”, I understand that a college year it’s divided in two periods (from winter to spring, and from spring to summer) and covers only half of a real year?
Okay, with that out of the way, I understand that Silver and Aric have, in some level, a kind of casual relationship; but they hadn’t discussed not once the fact that Silver it’s gonna come back to Equestria in a couple of months? I see her stressing because she is not gonna see him for most of summer break, but just a couple of months after that, she is gonna be leaving for good.
I imagine that you probably are gonna end this fic when Silver’s year ends, but personally I hope that after going back to Equestria, SG decides to come back and live in Earth, she could be a real pioneer, maybe create the first team of weather pegasi in Earth, helping us understand climate and fightin dangerous storm or tornados!
I also add my voice to the chore of voices asking for Meghan and Silver to finally do it.
Though I don’t finish to understand if they just don’t want to yet or if it's something they decided not to do because her relationship with Aric.
Lastly, a little more technical question; in canon, we knows that Celestia controls the sun, and we actually see her (and later Twilight) raising the sun in a specific moment (even as a special event, with the sun Celebration). But in our world, there isn’t a specific moment in which the sun raises. It’s just a question of in which part of the world you are standing; So, how do you think that works in Equestria? It’s equestria a round planet? Both sides of their world had opposite day/night cycles or they have all the same time? I wonder if Silver is familiar with opposite seasons in north/south hemisphere or opposite time in east/west parts of Earth.
So, well, you have me hooked! Great fic!
7535342 part of the reason it's so expensive is because it's fairly new. We barely know how to make them but we've been making conventional ones for a while. It's more expensive and complex, but maintenance is easier and fuel is cheaper. Several of the byproducts are also useful, such as a Plutonium isotope that's used in the medical industry. Plus they are way, way safer than conventional reactors. They are non pressurized and actively sustained (which is why they are so complex). it is literally impossible for it to catastrophically meltdown. Then the security issue is gone, neither thorium or it's byproducts can be used for WMDs.
The byproducts are less radioactive than naturally occurring uranium ore within a few centuries. and like I mentioned before, we haven't really thought about how to dispose of the waste much. Our only plan, which we don't even use anymore, was to bury it underground.
Lets look at some green energy sources:
hydroelectric: can only be built in certain locations. Drastically changes the environment
geothermal: expensive, difficult to maintain.
solar: low energy production per sq. ft. Not consistent, inneficient, ony good where it's sunny
wind: low energy productuion per sq. ft. Not consistent, only good where it's windy
If you want to provide consistent energy with solar or wind, you need to overproduce doing peak operation and store the energy. This problem is especially true in solar. You need to massively overproduce during peak demand with space inefficient production. Then, the dominant means of storage is lithium ion batteries. They are nasty to produce and most often made with strip mined materials. A lot of "green" energy sources have drawbacks as well. I honestly think nuclear is the best option. You get a shit ton of energy from a little fuel. Yes the waste is a big problem, but we haven't done a whole lot to figure out good ways to dispose it.
7535449
Troule is, thorium etc is in limited supply, when you start talking about only power source for multiple billion people, and its so un renewable, its a lot easier just to make a new sol class star.
Look up The Black Sun for someone who proposed building a massive fleet of Red Dwarf mining ships to collect 10 solar masses to build an interstellar transport black hole.
We dont need megastructures weiging millions of tons in orbit for PV conversion, theres already been plans announced using thin film 3D printed layered circuitry that absorbs optical light on teh front and emits microwave energy on the back. No square miles of kilogram copper cavity magnetrons here.
Personally Id want to spend research on direct down conversion using beat frequency pressed circuits that can be made in microns thick polymer on a newspaper printing press, then your main problem is stopping it from accelerating to a sizeable fraction speed of light by solar magnetic interactions.
In the UK theyre talking about spending roughly $20 Billion on a reactor design that hasnt even been shown to work yet, and its not Thorium. thats $1000 per house over roughly 3/4 the entire country. Thats 10kWh of lead acid if people purchased the things over the counter.
Companies can half that price, so add inverters and chargers etc.
Personally, Id rather use the old Victorian housing stocks cellars and put heavily insulated water tanks down there. 10-40 cubic metres each, with a roof made of standard Philips 85% thermal panels, with low temperature OTEC generators. gives you months of energy storage for the winter and thermal mass stabilisiation greatly reduces the AC load.
An awful lot of things, when you find out how they work are a lot cheaper than you thought they were going to be.
Thank goodness for patent licensing artificially inflating the prices for decades after otherwise all those poor people would have everything they needed. :evi:
7535449
And therein lies the problem. Essay incoming.
India is going ahead with a thorium reactor design called the Advanced Heavy-Water Reactor, starting construction this year.
Indias AHWR is a thorium fast breeder reactor. You don't hear much of Thorium breeder reactors, regrettably, though the concept is great. So are the technical and economic challenges.
If it was straightforward, the west would surely be powered by fast breeder reactors like the French 'Superphénix' by now, which never produced the energy equivalent to the energy consumed during its construction and was shut down 1997. Even if India is now going forward with a water cooled thorium reactor it is a long way from developing anything truly functional. If they get the reactor working, they still need to sort out the necessary reprocessing if they actually want to implement a somewhat sustainable fuel cycle. Here's an overview of some technical challenges with current Breeder designs.
1 - reprocessing is highly complex due to the nature of plutonium, even if we're only talking small amounts. Ask the French (or actually, ask their neighbours) about La Hague.
2 - reprocessing almost eliminates high level radioactive waste but creates very large amounts of low to medium level waste that still needs to be disposed of safely. It may not be dangerous in a thousand years, but it's dangerous in the here and now. And we don't know what to do with it.
3 - reprocessing of spent Fast Breeder Reactor fuel is an unsolved technical problem due to high burnup rates and buildup of trans-uranium elements
4 - reprocessing requires road or rail transport of waste and fuel, increasing the risk of accidents involving highly hazardous material
5 - cooling in existing designs cannot rely on water as water makes the reaction inefficient. It's going to be interesting to see how the Indians work around that.
6 - cooling by means of generally very corrosive molten metal like lithium (Superphénix) or sodium (the latter being the best coolant but reacting violently when coming into contact with air or water) is an enormous technical challenge as you cannot observe the core through the coolant, cannot shut the reactor down cold with the coolant inside as it would solidify and ruin the reactor, cannot properly decontaminate the coolant in the case of a fuel element failure etc. etc.
7 - cooling by gas (Helium, CO2, N2) is less dangerous but not very efficient for heat transfer and poses its own challenges revolving around containing superheated gas
8 - upscaling much beyond 1GW (again, like the Superphenix) invalidates the breeders main selling point, as the breeding ratio plummets when the breeding blanket around the core gets too thick because neutrons increasingly fail to reach the outer layers. This is most likely the underlying reason that India builds a 300MW plant. Breeders are also much more expensive to build due to the technical challenges. These two factors combine to make them uncompetitive to light water reactors that produce 4-5 times the energy at half the cost.
In the meantime until/if a significant number of such power stations come online (meantime being the next 3-4 decades) i think we're stuck with reducing our energy demands and using available technologies. Which means reducing consumption and going for renewables.
If the golden age of limitless thorium-generated energy should become reality, great! But don't hold your breath. It would be far easier, cheaper and more peaceful to drop the illusion of a sustainable consumer society which creates the need for exponential growth and unlimited energy in the first place.
7535642
Oh...
That is a beautiful idea. Headcanon established. One more reason a pony like Rarity wouldn't be caught dead grazing, oh the humiliation. But that's probably just another prissy unicorn thing.
Miss Silver Glow used NetFlix in an earlier chapter.
7535630
As far as solidification, an allow of NaK consisting of 22% Sodium, 2% Cæsium, and 76% Potassium has a liquid range from 200 K to 1300 K. This Nak-Alloy would not, under Earthly conditions, solidify. Unfortunately, it is highly reactive —— hypergolic —— when exposed to air or water.
If one wants to risk solidification, one can submerge a reactor-core in molten lead. Lead is much less reactive than alkali metals and absorb neutrons, which can interfere with the function of the reactor and (through neutron-activation) become radiogenic fore the same reason.
I know it's pie in the sky. That it's been fifty years in the future for the last 70 years. But.... Fusion should be 20 years away now. A working test plant in 10 years.
7531918
7531931
Yes, it is.
7531942
Even I haven't seen that one yet.
7531974
Tense shifted; thank you!
7531978
Apparently nobody else does. And--while I've only read the description of it on Wikipeida--I doubt that anyone would suggest it for her, and I doubt she'd like it at all if she somehow found herself watching it.
7531987
Totally unplanned--that's just the way things happened to line up.
7531994
I dunno, man, I've heard about the NYC sewer-gators pretty much all my life. One more reason to stay away from there, IMHO.
7532021
Pinkie is, but I'm torn if she's the pony I'd want with me in a real clutch situation. AJ's my girl for that.
orig10.deviantart.net/c963/f/2015/068/9/1/samurai_applejack_by_behind_space-d8l24u7.png
Also, correction made. Thank you!
7532170
Or else she's just a sourpuss and doesn't like anybody.
It's really hard to work the series into a serious story. It can be done, but it's easier to pretend it doesn't exist.
Of course she is.
7532185
Jet's isn't bad. A little pricy, compared to some of the other chains.
They won't deliver to my town, but they'll meet you in a parking lot south of town.
7532232
Although if Silver had her druthers, she'd be up in the air in nothing but her fur.
7532236
It does; can verify. I had pony dreams for a couple of months after I first started really getting into the show. I've heard about people who play a lot of tetris having tetris dreams. I think there's even a name for that (it's probably 'tetris dream' because sometimes scientists aren't that creative).
Yes, very much so.
I like the first one best.
7532326
They did. (That's one thing that Meghan can cross off her bucket list now.)
7532350
She probably doesn't know.
That sounds like a dare.
That's not Silver's cup of tea.
7532359
Yes--the horse which Silver rides probably is over ten times heavier than Silver is. And of course a riding horse has nothing on a draft horse.
Or a human. I heard about a guy who got so badly savaged by mules that the police initially thought wolves had done it.
7532398
I would assume after contact became somewhat routine, porn of ponies and porn with ponies probably started appearing.
7532565
All she's got to do is change her name in the story and nobody will know it's a self-insert.
7532696
He could rake in the bits. Probably be hard to persuade him to leave the farm, though.
7533170
I think closer to ten, total. The film mentioned would have been very early, long before humans knew much about Equestria at all.
Sort of like a lot of broadcast news, the idea is to be the first one filming and making commentary, and you can always issue retractions later.
7533493
It would be funny if the two were somehow kind of linked. LIke, the computers didn't crash but suddenly ponies appeared.
My Y2K celebration was changing the tire on a police car in a K-mart parking lot. When I got the jack back out from under it, I saw that it was after midnight and the lights were still on in the parking lot, so I figured everything had gone all right.
7533728
She's not even a full decade out from turning into a teenager.
7537874 Considering most of the time they name stuff either after the one who discovered/created/whatever it or the one they discovered it on, Tetris dream would be a very original name by their standards.
We've seen better of course, but still.
I did have a few "video game" dream after some really long and late playing session, but most of the time my brain just don't fill me with actual image from the game/movie/series/book but rather ideas and themes or sometime character making cameo.
7532398
Well, my story wouldn't spoil anything here since it's not actually about Admiral's world. And I should warn you that it's probably not about the teasing you think. It's Horse in Equestria x Pegasus, which is something I don't think the porn industry would touch.
7534858
I've considered that possibility, which is why I have two cell phones, both with their own alarms.
7535055
This fits pretty well with my headcanon. It doesn't help that the different tribes all kept different records. The pegasi probably didn't write much of anything down; the unicorns kept track of kingdoms, and the earth ponies kept track of their kin. Plus the Crystal Ponies would have still been around then, but they've been gone long enough that almost everyone's forgotten, and whatever records they had disappeared with them, only to emerge a thousand years later.
We know that the old castle of the Two Sisters was destroyed; I assume that they salvaged what they could afterwards, but they would have lost a lot of records that way, too.
So basically what they've got is the same historical mess that we've got--some really good, really specific records, some where you can piece things together from multiple sources, and some things where you know something happened but you have no idea what.
My own headcanon is that she and Luna came in as peacemakers after the events of Hearth's Warming but before Discord was stoned and before the Crystal Empire fell, then after the Crystal Empire fell, Luna went rogue and was banished. I assume that 'thousand years' is the pony way of saying 'a long time ago,' rather than being a specific date.
In her case, I'd say probably only whatever was lost when the Castle of the Two Sisters fell.
7535070
Sounds like a fun time, mostly. I've seen some 1 v 1 fencing matches in the SCA style, and what amused me about those was that in the matches I watched they were allowed to use an off-hand weapon or shield. One guy had a sock puppet he taunted with.
I haven't seen that much heavy combat, which is too bad. I've seen choreographed matches, but not any 'real' matches.
Probably because they can make smaller holes. The ones for underground wiring have to be big enough that someone can get down there and fix stuff when it's broken, whereas a frackhole is probably less than twelve inches in diameter. I think in most places, for most people, geothermal's a big up-front cost and fossil fuels are so cheap right now it's hard to justify the payoff . . . but that depends on what your other options are. One of my friends burns wood because otherwise he pays for propane, whereas I have natural gas, and it's probably less than $500 a year, versus probably $20,000-$30,000 for a geothermal setup . . . . unless natural gas prices went up substantially, geothermal wouldn't pay off in my lifetime.
7535111
Some of it depends on how you store the electricity to use it later. In Michigan, we've got one pumped storage facility on the West coast which was built in conjunction with the Palisades nuclear plant, since (as I'm sure you know) you can't get nuclear online or offline quickly. Michgan's geography lends itself to pumped storage facilities on the West side, and we could also use it for solar or wind installations.
I've also seen plans for a small home solar system that heats an underground tank. That one was for home heating, but it's plausible you could use a similar system for electricity (perhaps not in a cost-effective manner, though). As for A/C, a well-designed house barely needs it. I haven't got it, and there are very few times that I regret not having A/C.
A while back I read about a proposal to make underground, single-use nuclear reactors which would be charged once, and then used until the nuclear fuel was depleted, and then not dug back up. I don't know if that's a workable system, but it seems like it might be.
7535114
Nuclear waste is a problem, as is the slow (relatively speaking) speed to get reactors on or offline . . . it's hard to meet the demands of the grid. I think it's possible to have safe nuclear power as part of the backbone of our electrical system, but we need other technologies to supplement it, and we have to figure out a waste storage solution before we build more plants.
7535158
7535215
That's true, although it would probably be easier to just have the wire hanging down rather than flying it from cloud to cloud.
7535342
IIRC, one of the other advantages is if there's a failure, it fails safe--no meltdowns.
The two problems with them are siteing, and making up for fluctuations in the grid. Those aren't insurmountable problems, of course, but they're challenges.
We've got a couple of big wind farms in Michigan. One of them's off 127, north of St. Johns. The weird thing was that I used to go up that way all the time, then didn't for a few years, and the next time I did there were wind turbines as far as the eye could see.
Every part of it, too. The mining, the transport, the storage, and the burning. So it's not like there's one step you could clean up to make it better; it's the whole process. Kind of like the tar sands.
7535449
Ha! I did remember that part correctly.
I think on a commercial scale, though, Li-ion batteries aren't used because they're expensive, and really impractical when you need to store megawatts of energy. Things like pumped storage or molten storage or potentially even giant flywheels would be more practical and more scalable, in my opinion. Granted, all of those have drawbacks, too, but I think they're more practical than battery banks for large commercial usage.
As I recall, Germany has been experimenting with using wind turbines to make hydrogen, which would be another way to store the energy. Not so good on a small scale, but potentially workable for a big installation.
I agree--I think that nuclear can be cleaner than a lot of other technologies, so long as we can figure out a way to deal with the waste and contamination.
7535549
Thermal mass is wonderful stuff.
One of the things we should be doing is turning our eyes back sometimes to how our ancestors did things. They had some solutions to problems which we pretty much ignore because energy is cheap right now . . . partially burying houses would be an enormous energy savings year-round. Shadetrees, a well-oriented house, and good attic crossflow really helps to keep the heat down most of the time, too. I've not got any AC, and it's pretty rare that I wish I did.
7535630
Now that I can get behind. Really, no matter what our technology, the Earth has a limited amount of resources, so until we get to the point where we can strip-mine Jupiter for resources we're stuck with what we've got; using less of it is never a bad solution.
Eh, they've probably got some kind of newfangled spell for that anyways, but it's not as satisfying as taking care of business the old-fashioned way.
Thinking on that, I seem to recall turpentine used to be used as a worming agent in large animals. I'd better go back and read through my Herriot again. Because it would a be a great scene in a HiE when a pony chugs a bottle of turpentine to clean herself out.
7535705
On her own computer, or saw it used on someone else's computer?
7535901
I seem to recall that that's one of those technologies (like AI) where when they solve one set of problems it just leads them to the next set of problems.
Not saying it isn't workable, just that from what I recall, it's more complicated than anyone ever thought it would be.
7537905
Just wikipediaed it. It is in fact called the Tetris Effect.
7537920
What the hell is there that the porn industry wouldn't touch?