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My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
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Seriously? There are spells to cast lighting (not to mention the ones produced by pegasus magic) but not basic studies about how electricity behaves (and why its dangerous)?
Unlike DnD etc, wearing full plate mail makes it very difficult to hurt you with electric based lighting attacks, instead because the metal conductts efficiently around the body, what you have to aim fore is enough overpower in the bolt, to cause excess heating at least at what non fully overlapped joints occur if not the bulk of the material.
Most lightning conductors are copper of about a quarrter square inch cross section.
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People used piped gas for decades before they figured out exactly how that worked. To them, it was just a strange gas that burned. Similarly, oil, which we used for thousands of years before we figured out the how and why of it.
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It can really be amazing from an outside view how people just take what they have for granted without asking 'why?' once you already know what the answer to that question is.
She knows how to make electricity for awesome displays of magic, or for zapping things she wants to back off. It has other uses?!
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This is truth. Wearing full plate is actually fairly good protection against casual electrical hazards.
My one complaint about this fic so far? Short chapters, and long waits for updates. Of course, if you keep up the quality of writing, I'm more than willing to put up with it. Looking forward to more.
Keep up the good work. Deus tecum.
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But it has to be grounded or you'll end up finishing the connection with a body part.
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At the moment, two updates a month are being covered by the patreon. Sometimes, it is voted to get extra updates. You could join the patreon and vote yourself, you could also grab the cheering Pony level and specifically kick it up one more update a month.
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Standing on the ground would work, no?
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Certainly an option, but I don't have the spear cash to do so. Thus, I shall simply have to be patient.
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As long as there is a continuous connection of metal from the impact point to the ground. For example, if the armour pieces are tied together with rope (which is non-conductive) then their connections are only where the pieces haphazardly touch each other. Even a tiny bit of dirt separating them could cause the electricity to go through the person wearing the armour.
medievalarmour.com/images/Product/large/AH-A031.png
This, for example, has each piece isolated from the next by leather ties. The electricity would ground through the wearer.
Helmets are another problem. They are never attached to the rest of the armour. Similarly, the arm and legs must move freely, and are not directly attached by metal. Not to mention that most of then have leather lining inside which tend to hold the metal joints apart.
Just because you have to be able to take it off and put it on means the various pieces are not in good contact with each other.
Thinking about it, the best armour would be entirely chain link that you could use metal latches:
ae01.alicdn.com/kf/HTB14UMiOVXXXXchXXXXq6xXFXXXF/Bolsa-tor-o-vez-saco-bolsa-de-moedas-de-bloqueio-tom-de-prata-fechos-fechamento-da.jpg_640x640.jpg
to connect to the next piece.
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Live and learn.
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The best demonstration of that was one at a science museum. This guy was inside a metal cage (~10 feet high and wide), LEANING against the bars as electricity bolts (as in like a Jacobs ladder) were playing all across the outside. Freaky as hell. He said it made the bars he was leaning against slightly warm. But the electricity was running along the OUTSIDE of the round bars that made the cage (as in the side of the round bars that were facing away from the cage). Think about that. The electricity was running only through half of each bar's surface!
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I'd imagine any metal armor made after the understanding of conductivity would have "grounding wires" (or equivalent) linking the pieces, if only to protect against lightning strikes.
Finally. The Lightning Bringer has an inkling of living up to his title.
First Law of Electrical Engineering: 'Ground Always Wins'.
A better thing to explain to Easy is the nature of Tools to make the Tools to make the Tools.
"My cell phone here is made with an array of tiny little squares called microchips. Inside each chip are thousands upon thousands of tiny 'switches' that create what is known as logic circuits. They run on electricity that is carefully controlled by a series if imprinted instructions so complex that I could never hope to explain them to you even if I had a book and read it directly to you.
To make these microchips, you have to create a set of machines that grow them at tiny sizes. But to create THOSE machines, you have to have slightly larger microchips that have fewer circuits built into them, so they're slower and less efficient. Those slower, but larger chips are made in similar, but less complex machines, that in turn had to be made with design tools that were larger. And this goes on and on back to the start.
My cell phone is essentially the end of nearly a century of designing a switching machine that does math problems. Every time we made a better one, we used it to help design methods to make the machine smaller and faster. We had machines that did simple math problems the size of the throne room, and we worked on them one generation at a time, making them smaller, speeding them up. We created instructions that increased in complexity along side them to take advantage of the speed, starting with simple things like 'if two inputs are on, then the output must be on'.
We call these things as a whole computers, because they perform 'computations'. A powerful enough computer with really complicated instructions, which we call programs, can easily store and track all the information about everything going on in Equestria. In short, with electronics, which is the field of technology that computers and even simple electric lights fall under, you can literally hold the entirety of the knowledge in the Canterlot archives in the frog of your hoof.
But I can't just make these things appear. We have to create the machines that make the electricity reliably. We have to create the tools that use that power to make better tools. Ponies have to learn how those tools work, and how the principles behind them work as well if they want to improve on a tool with the next tool it is used to create. We have to make the switches that react to their inputs to create desired outputs. And that will take literal generations."
"So... It's like inventing all of magic and all the spells in it from scratch?"
"Exactly. But you have an advantage with me around."
"And what's that?"
"I already know it works."
(A lot of technological advances are accidents or guesses with no real inclination of what the end product might be, or if there even WAS an end product to be had. The mere cheat of going 'yes, there IS in fact a working product on the end of this idea down the line' can be a massive jump start. Imagine playing civilization, but you don't get to look at the tech tree. Instead, every round rolls an RNG and you 'might' get something discovered. That's how it worked for us with only some minor chaining here and there. But in this story, the ponies have a chance to see what the tech tree has, even if they can't just jump to whatever they want. And one thing I do like, is that Easy just learned that he knows how electricity behaves though indirect example.)
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By the time we understood electricity, conductivity, and lightning, metal armour had already been discarded — anything thick enough to stop a bullet (the middle 1700's) was too heavy for anyone wearing it to move. And lightning Rods were invented in 1749 by Benjamin Franklin.
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You can build a computer, that can run a program, out of paper clips mounted on a wheel. A row of eight form the one/zeros needed for eight-bit calculations, and the circumference of the wheel determines the length of the program (I did it in eighth-grade). Also, there have been computers built using plumbing pipes and water. And, Or, Nand, and Nor gates are all possible.
In fact, if this engineer knows programming, he could use FORTH to create a magic-based computer that unicorns could operate. And if he were knowingly headed to this pre-industrial but magical world, I would certainly hope he had thought of making a magical-calculator to at least run the numbers for his construction projects (load-bearing vs diameter vs length, etc.).
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I'm just about to wonder why the story was named that in the first place. My guess is that he design the prototype of that torturing machine in Twilight's library basement.
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Or maybe a slide rule? That's a calculating tool that can be used without magic, the ponies could potentially reproduce themselves with available materials, and was powerful enough to be used by first rate engineers into the space age:
2.bp.blogspot.com/-B5_eTqrI7Nc/V8WDvUu6yyI/AAAAAAAAFbk/_Spxl1aSN1oL-0S5t4GX7qUTuk6HQCkAwCLcB/s1600/Slide%2BRule.jpg
They also made specialized versions for specific calculations:
rfcafe.com/references/electrical/images2/mm-wave-system-calculator-cardboard-hughes-neil-b-2.jpg
This should cover them until they figure out cheap transistors and/or put a satellite in orbit.
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True, but a computer beats a calculator for decimal accuracy almost everytime. Especially in repetitive recursive math problem. And, as I said, you can build one using standard plumbing pipes and water. One Canterlot has in plenty, and the other is technologically available as soon as you figure out how to make glazed-clay pipes.
But, yes. slide-rules would be an excellent start. Have Earth ponies make them at triple-size and have unicorns then shrink them to convenient pocket size for use. However, depending on when this "engineer" was born, would he even ever have seen a slide-rule? In the 1990's I slide-rules were difficult to find, with the counters filled with calculators instead.
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Flour also works and is readily available. And wet flour sticks to anything — just ask a cook!
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Napalm would be a decisive weapon in any battle with entrenched ground troops, or battling many of the larger monsters that inhabit the region, without unnecessary risk of your troops lives. And gasoline is one of the by-products when you cook raw oil.
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Your body isn't directly touching the metal -- there's padding that should be way more insulating than the leather ties. Leather is fairly conductive to the point where they warn against using leather gloves when working with electricity. Cloth is not.
OTOH if you were using exclusively leather padding... maybe you'd have an issue.
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Maybe for low voltages of 120-240 VAC. At lightning voltages (40,000-300,000 volts), cloth is absolutely no protection. Sparks easily jump three and four inches. Ever seen a Jacobs Ladder? I made one with a Neon sign transformer at 18,000 VAC and a cut-up coat hanger (stuck the two pieces into a piece of wood, in a "v" shape). Cloth offered no protection. Even the rubber over the wires didn't help much. In the garage where we were playing with it (and I do mean playing--how we didn't kill ourselves I'm still not sure), I was holding standard two-wire lamp cable (separated into two long pieces, one for each end of the transformer, and could see sparks through my finger nails as I held the two wires in my hands and tried to see how far apart I had to move the wires before the blazing hot spark connecting them went out! It tingled slightly was my only clue. We switched to high-voltage wire (significantly thicker). Discovered a bit later that the voltage was arcing through the wood because we noticed, at first, a thin black line in the wood connecting the two pieces at the bottom of the "v". Later it got a lot bigger and the wood caught fire. Parents today would keel over in shock at some of the things I did as a kid. (Lead Paint? HA! I used to have a kit for melting and pouring my own lead soldiers. I spent hours in my bedroom melting broken soldiers and pouring new ones. Used a candle to "black" the molds so the lead figures would release easier.)
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no reason, was just expanding on something who I replied to said. but yeah, Equestria isn't advanced enough to have either of the base materials for it, so it doesn't matter.
Awesome story!
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Glad to serve.
Don't walk on an injured limb, especially if it's an open wound. Especially don't leave the location if help has been sent for.
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I once split my toe in half with an ax and went to school the next day