I pulled at the straps again. They held tight. “Twilight, help me with that.”
Twilight grabbed the oxygen mask in her hooves and suddenly pressed it to her chest. “…No.”
“Come on, Twilight, we talked about this.”
“This is suicide, Rainbow,” she said, with a hint of tears in her eyes. “You’re going to hurt yourself. I only helped you because I hoped you’d wise up along the way.”
I grinned. “Hello, have we met? I’m Rainbow Dash, the fastest flier in Equestria. Seriously, Twilight, drop it, I’m doing it and that’s final. I thought you knew me better than that.”
She sighed. “What if the engine explodes?”
“Pinkie made it,” I pointed out. “Her stuff only explodes when it’s funny. It wouldn’t be very funny if it exploded up there, and Pinkie wouldn’t be able to see it, so I think I’m good.”
“But what’s the point?” Twilight started, finally relenting and connecting the tube of the oxygen mask to the tank on my back, “We’ve been to the Moon already. There are much safer ways to get there. Hay, I could teleport you there if you wish to go again so much. I would need to make about fifteen jumps in quick succession, but I know I can do that, and we’d be there in a minute.”
I stared at her. “I’m not doing that to get to the moon, Twilight! I’m doing it to see if I can.”
She looked at me thoughtfully, checking the fuel level for the fifth time. I bet it’s the same as the first four times. If it isn’t, I have a leak, which would be very uncool. “But have you thought about how you are going to get back?” she asked. “If anything breaks down…”
I scanned the room for a certain napkin. Yes, I kept that napkin. I kept it all this time since you calculated it. You might have forgotten, but I kept it. “Here,” I said, fishing it out from between Applejack’s tools and Pinkie’s emergency candy box. “You wrote it yourself.”
Twilight stared. “Is that…”
“Yes, it’s your calculation of required delta V to reach an orbit around the Moon,” I confirmed. I didn’t even know what delta V was, back then, but the idea stuck. “The one that says that a pegasus should be able to do it, if they can fly fast enough. Well, tell you what, I can fly fast enough. I’m not good at the egghead stuff, but I’ve got you for this. I’m not good at tinkering, but I have Applejack and Pinkie and Rarity. They all doublechecked that. I learned every breathing exercise Fluttershy knew, I can hold my breath for ten minutes. I’ve got enough wing power. I didn’t, a month ago, but now I do. I can get home even if everything breaks.”
Twilight pulled the napkin out of my hoof with her magic and tried to stare a hole through it again.
“I’m an athlete, Twilight, I do stunts,” I said. “I might be reckless, but I’m not stupid. Yes, it’s risky. If it isn’t, what’s the point? I’ve covered every base you could think of.”
She sighed, but finally decided there was nothing else she could say. I actually felt bad for her a bit.
“If it makes you happier,” I said, zipping up the high altitude suit, “It will make me happier that I have a friend watching my back. Even if I never need the help.”
✶ ✶ ✶
The plan was simple.
That’s what I liked about it, it didn’t require much of anything I didn’t know already. Fly up as high as possible, which is why I needed the high altitude suit and the oxygen mask. Go as fast as possible. Up there, high above the clouds, where the air is thin, barely air at all, it’s only me and my wings, and I can accelerate much faster than the air will slow me down. Pegasi fly by magic, you know. We don’t really push against the air, we push against the magic in it. Bigger wings help, but really, it’s all in how you use them.
Once I’ve accelerated enough for compression heating to start – and that’s really, really fast – my trajectory is all that is holding me to the Earth, so I need a rocket engine to give me one last push out of the magic field. If I time it just right, if I get the angle just right, it should only take a few minutes to get captured by the gravity of the Moon and fall down. Wouldn’t want to spend more time in space than absolutely necessary. Pinkie said, that in space, nopony can hear you squee. We didn’t get to test that back then, and I’d rather not do it this time either.
And if I don’t miss the entry angle, I will glide down and land on the other side of the Moon.
I have trained for this. I even studied for this. I can do this.
Piece of cake.
There’s cake and a party waiting for me when I get back. I Pinkie promised I would show up.
I looked down at the Earth, into the cloud layer deep below me, and saw a purple spot following. As I kept accelerating, Twilight tried her best to keep up, she was even leaving a contrail. When I passed the sonic rainboom threshold, I saw that unmistakable pink glow of her magic behind the rainbow, as she tried to do something clever on the spot… Yes, blasting holes for herself in the air to fly faster, and you called me reckless.
But that wasn’t enough. She had to switch to teleporting, crossing miles with every jump, but even that wasn’t enough to keep up, and eventually, I lost sight of her.
My suit was getting hotter, but Rarity’s best work held fast. It’s almost time, the Moon is rising.
I gave it one last push, tilted upwards by gently twisting my wings, and pressed the button of the rocket engine to start the burn.
What remained of the air exploded.
Twilight once told me that the words “Sonic Rainboom” are actually nonsense. It’s not really sonic. Lots of things can go faster than sound, and they don’t make rainbows in the air. Only things that fly by magic do, because when you push magic into magic, magic pushes back. If you push really hard, which you’re not supposed to be able to do, magic goes splat all over your goggles and makes the pretty colors. “Magic Rainboom” would be a better term, but “Sonic” just sounds so much cooler.
That’s old news.
At the edge of the atmosphere, there’s a sharp boundary, like a water surface, where magic stops and space begins. And as I finally crossed it, I saw the infinite wave of rainbow spreading out in all directions, covering the entire Earth in my colors, from Crystal Empire to Badlands, from Griffonstone to Luna Sea, an endless ocean of chromatic light.
And that’s how I knew I was in orbit.
That’s how all my friends knew.
Assuming that Rainbow's escape velocity is somewhat over the speed of sound and that Epona is as dense as Earth, I'm getting 322km for the radius of the whole planet. That's less than what you'd need for the body to self-shape into a sphere (400km for ice, 600km for rock, if memory serves).
Crikey.
(Also, you may want to do some spaces between paragraphs. This dense form is hard to read.)
Best line!
Cool sciencey stuff! These should be fun stories.
Minor punctuation niggles aside, looks good. You really do need to put line spaces between your paragraphs though. I found the first-person Rainbow Dash interesting. Haven't seen that before.
7051836
This one is not mine, alas. It's a direct throwback to Friendship is Magic #6 where they do go to the Moon, and which I based a lot of my estimates on...
7051752
There is considerable confusion over how fast Rainbow actually goes in canon, and some authors actually go so far as to cite Mach 10. Which is probably nonsense, at least for low altitudes, but I'm assuming that there is a sweet spot at the top of the atmosphere where pegasus propulsion still works, which would permit them to accelerate indefinitely, if they can survive this. The planet is tiny, despite 1g surface gravity. The atmosphere isn't very deep. The moon is close, and also has an atmosphere somehow.
Well, if the world is crazy, why not exploit it? Rainbow would want to, eventually. :)
As for paragraphs... I'd love to put some spacing between paragraphs, rather than just an empty line, but alas. You can adjust line height when reading, though.
EDIT: There, rebuilt with no-indent, spaced paragraphs. :( I suppose I should do the same to Aporia...
Fun stuff, and I am interested to see where you go with this concept.
(We too listen to both cellos and dubstep, you know. )
322 Km radium? That would give a surface area of about 1.32 million square kilometers, or 502 thousand square miles: if we accept this globe as canon https://derpicdn.net/img/2012/8/28/85176/full.png even if Equestria occupies the whole or most of one of those purported continent, it is unlikely to be more than 100,000 square miles, or around the size of Great Britain. Doesn't seem like it would have room for the diversity of landscapes on the show, but then it's climate and ecosystems in no way are likely to make sense, either.
7052794
Check the blog post referred to in the author's note for lots of research that lead me to this particular piece. :)
My guess is that the pony Earth is not that small, (I can't tell how small it has to be exactly from the very limited information available) but when adding up all the canonical statements, it does come out to be something much more at home in Kerbal Space Program than in our universe. The Moon, however, totally is no more than 500km in diameter.
And Equestria seems to be occupying about 1/8th of the total planetary surface...
I used to accept Reality Check´s personal interpretation: Equestria is still stuck in a pre-industrial period, and almost all their technology is either imported from the other countries (minotaurs, gryphons, and other races with hand-like appendices) or copied from the human-like world from the mirror, resulting in the schizo. It´s not so unlike many examples in real life.
7053025
It’s a good interpretation,¹ and all too often I see authors settle on no interpretation at all when the issue does come up, which I find silly.² But I think I can wring more drama out of the ponies who stand on their own (or at least try to) as an alien race in an alien world. These shorts are not about interpretation. They’re about what the ponies can do with what they have. :)
7053025 Personally, my headcanon is all the tech more advanced than 19th century state of the art aren't actually tech at all, but operate by magic. (In other words, a (pony) Wizard did it. )
7053996
If magic is a natural force in Equestria like electricity is our universe, then is science. Just changing Watts for Thaums.
7054003
Yes, but it's not necessarily going to involve the mechanical complexity of electricity-driven machinery.
For analogy, Diskworld cameras:
The box said, "It's no good. I've run out of pink."
A hitherto unnoticed door opened in front of his eyes. A small, green and hideously warty humanoid figure leaned out, pointed at a colour-encrusted palette in one clawed hand, and screamed at him.
"No pink, See?" screeched the homunculus."No good you going on pressing the lever when there's no pink, is there? If you wanted pink you shouldn't of took all those pictures of young ladies, should you? It's monochrome from now on, friend. Alright?"
"Alright. Yeah, Sure," said Rincewind. In one dim corner of the little box he thought he could see an easel, and a tiny unmade bed. He hoped he couldn't. "So long as that's understood," said the imp, and shut the door. Rincewind thought he could hear the muffled sound of grumbling and the scrape of a stool being dragged across the floor.
Interesting. There's quite a bit of schizophrenic technology in Equestria to explore, and if every chapter is this good, this will most certainly be a grand trip indeed.
R ∈ {} != R ∉ {}, if you ask me.
7055730
Um... An empty set by definition has no elements, so isn't R ∈ {} just nonsense? :)
7056130
That depends on how you read it. In a certain sense, it means, that ((R ∈ {}) == (R = {}}) != (R ∉ {} == R != {}), but I'm not enough of a mathematician to prove it.
Hell, even if it was just me talking out of my ass, it was fun to talk about it outside of a math lecture. Brofist for that, dude.
7056137
Hey, I'm not a mathematician at all, (most types of mathematical syntax don't agree with me and it's mutual) but a more readable definition of Russel's paradox just wouldn't fit in there. :)
7056164
Shows how much I don't know about that stuff, then. I sure as hell ain't in any position to argue with Bertrand Russell. If he thinks it's a paradox, it probably is.
7056164
> a more readable definition of Russel's paradox
How about this?
R = { S | S ∉ S }
R ∈ R?
Showing what crazy things ponies can do with what they have? You, sir, are a man after my own heart. Have an internet cookie!
*raises hand*
*lowers hand*
well, good. If anyone can fetch her, it's Pinkie Pie. She's faster than RD, after all, and can appear near any who swear to her domain.