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My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Fanfiction
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Handsome hooves? Huh...
The amount of magic I'd used is limited by what the enchanters would supply. Essentially, Id need a cost comparison between magic and manual filtration. I highly doubt they (as a guild or group) like the idea of cheaper water, given the current magitech. So A) do they know what the pipe enchantment is for? And B) how long will the enchantment last? Is it permanent, or does it need maintenance, hence creating a likely exponential cost over time? Would earth-pony level oversight of mechanical/chemical solutions be more cost effective?
I'm uncertain of the restraints to constructing charcoal or other filters, but perhaps magic would be better used constructing those (in the same way the smithies likely have a unicorn or two about).
Unicorn magic for spells of cleaning and maintenance, which are taken from the Palace, or worked out with the Palace staff and then added to it. Earth pony magic, understanding, for the flow of water through plants, as in giving the mountain and city a vascular system, even growing pipes if possible to give graduated monocrystaline metals, never mind ceramics and mixed oxides will give materials that can last a geologic age. Pegasus magic for connecting the flow of water against the material of the pipes to generate the electrical magic required to power and sustain the unicorns maintenance spells. Damage to the pipes would result in the water flow powering the disolving and reprecipitation of pipe material. just like growing rocks, geodes, gems etc. After all, we need the Pie are Squared jokes.
It might be the Ponyville Dam, but in lots of cases, a large dam and reservoir is built on a river in one place, then massive canals aqueducts or pipes and siphons are used to move the water from that source, many miles to its destination. Given the age though, one design for the Dam, instead of an Earth embankment, would be Whin Sill stlye, a frozen sheet of intrusive or cast molten rock, very fine grained, strong, but brittle, depending on if magic could be use to force the core to grow large old mixed crystals rapidly for toughness against the surface fine grain for hardness and wear.
Maybe magic can be used to tweak the pipes so that capillary length, height, can be used instead of Torricellian height. Agains from Earth ponies, take a foundation source from the street and be able to supply a ten story building without high pressure at the base?
Something about rotary, corliss valves and resonant ram operation? The basic simple rams Ive seen are very inefficient due to just being a box, a bottle, adn two pop valves which can sometimes work even without spring loading though at far lower supply pressure, flow rate? Because of the shocks, are also extremely loud. and that was the hose pipe one. The sound emmited by one capable of supplying a city flow of water up an estimated thousand metres could be horrific. Macro Capiliaries would need breaking into 10 stages to do the same effect, and work silently, possibly by Maxwells Deamon. Lots of tiny ratchets working on random movement. the water molecules move up far enough, they reach the next ratchet, they try and move down, theyre more likely to bounce up off the ratchet than slip down?
So much fun in plumbing.
Poison joke isn't a very well phonomenon at this point. - Poison joke isn't a very well known/understood/studied phonomenon at this point.
tough he looked - though he looked
9326603
Fix fix!
9326607
Oops.
phonomenon - phenomenon
9326609
Fix 2, with a vengeance!
Bow Chicka Wow Wow.
Well, Applejack named her legs and Sunburst named his beard. So I think hooves can be handsome?
I doubt ponies at this point in time know an iota of engineering.
9328584
considering that the term still applies to siege engines, I'd assume not. On top of that, they are at the point where magic is the be-all end-all solution.
9331048 I keep forgetting that ponies are a magical race. Heh, magical.
Splash of magic is a good idea. He isn't building the filters and cleaners himself anyway, and an enchanted pipe should be easier to maintain and replace anyway.
In-universe, of course it's a good idea. If a third of your population has hammers, it makes sense to use nails. If you want electrical power on Mercury, solar panels are probably a pretty good choice. If you want power on Pluto, they suddenly make less sense.
Consider the question posed by your protagonist at the end of this chapter. Do they use a ram pump? A windmill? An Archimedes' screw pump? There are lots of choices, and which is best depends on the specific circumstances of environment that they'll be building in.
Equestria has magic. That's a major "environment" factor. It would be silly, from an engineering point of view, to ignore it simply because he's unfamiliar with it.
That said...this has consequences. What sort of story are you trying to tell? Because it's fairly likely that while he has useful ideas to offer, there may things he's (or you the author) might be super excited about...that might turn out to be pointless for this world. For example, does it really make sense to build centralized electrical plants and city-wide grids in a world where at least one third and maybe two thirds of the population can conjure electricity? Why build a fuel-burning plant and wires everywhere when you can simply hire pegasi to charge batteries via lightning bolt to local mini-grids?
Or consider this water transportation project. How much effort will it involve? How much quarrying of stone? How many thousands of tons of bricks to move, to be laid? Is it a project for hundreds of ponies to spend months or years working on? What if all of that could be replaced with a team of six unicorns working for a week to create a one-way teleportation portal to both transport the water into the city and act as a valve? Maybe that's something they can't do, but maybe it is.
Or how about this: use pegasi for water. Instead of piping the water over land, build a giant floating containment vessel in the sky out of cloudcrete, and have a team of pegasi direct rain into it to keep it full. Now all of your waterflow can be powered by gravity, and since the water is passing through a vapor stage to get there, it's probably safe to drink without further purification required.
"Simply create a thousand ton water tower in the sky" is crazy talk if you're on Earth, but that might be an extremely practical solution in Equestria.
There are probably a lot of things like this that make sense when your population can walk on clouds and levitate and teleport.
Realistically, an engineer in Equestria would be foolish to not adapt to the capabilities of the population and environment. A lot of the methods he's familiar with probably don't make any more sense here than building a glove and shoe industry. If he's a good engineer, he should be able to take the tools he's given and work with them.
But...what's the story you want to write? Because if your goal was to write about a human bringing human technology for the betterment of Equestria...setting out down this road might not take you to where you want to go.
Time for a little soul searching as a writer, I think.
9388381
Your suggestion is not how Canterlot ended up. You're changing the future, nooooo!
Water towers are your best bet. Relatively low tech, few moving parts, consistent water pressure over a wide area. Getting it up there? Well, there are a number of ways to do it... the problem is that you're trying to lift that water a loooooooong way, and it's going to want to come straight down. Canterlot is on the side of a mountain, pretty far up there, and the best solution? Hm... it's tough, without electricity. Using only mechanical energy is difficult, because you have to get any sort of energy from where it's generated to where it's needed. Electrical is as simple as using wires to conduct the electricity from the generator to the pumps. Mechanical is next to impossible to get from place to place. Best that you're going to get is to set up a number of hydraulic lines along the water main that take mechanical energy generated at the base of the mountain and carry it up to the pumping stations that take the water higher and higher. Hydraulics work because water doesn't like to be compressed, and therefore is very good at multiplying force or even communicating mechanical energy from place to place almost one for one, but unfortunately you get issues when your hydraulic lines are uphill: namely, that you start building pumping stations for your hydraulics as well as your water mains, and that's just a catch 22 that you can't escape from. Plus, those had better be some amazingly strong pipes, or they're going to burst from the pressure exerted by all that pressurized fluid pressing on them.
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Welcome to the story! You've smashed into it with vigor.