AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 313
ARES III SOL 309
[08:03] JPL: Daily check. Solar activity subsided a bit, so maybe comms will be better today. We estimate Sol 318 will be LOS day, after which Hermes will attempt to acquire Pathfinder’s signal every day until it works. With luck that’ll be Sol 328. Hope all of you are all right.
[08:42] WATNEY: We’re fine, but it’s bugging me why you told us not to build the engine carriage mounts on Rover 2. You have a reason. If data loss is the problem, just keep resending until it gets through. In the meantime, we’re staying busy doing science to magic, or magic to science, whatever. Waiting on your answer. – Mark
[09:41] SYSTEM: ERROR - Destination reports Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold – Message Not Sent
[09:42] WATNEY: system_command: REPEAT
[09:42] SYSTEM: Last message resent.
[10:41] SYSTEM: ERROR - Destination reports Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold – Message Not Sent
[13:19] WATNEY: system_command: REPEAT
[13:20] SYSTEM: Last message resent.
[14:18] SYSTEM: ERROR - Destination reports Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold – Message Not Sent
[14:19] WATNEY: system_command: REPEAT
[14:19] SYSTEM: Last message resent.
[15:30] WATNEY: About fucking time.
[16:28] SYSTEM: ERROR - Destination reports Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold – Message Not Sent
AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 314
ARES III SOL 310
Starlight Glimmer shut off the field projector, looking with pride at the six new ordinary-sized mana batteries she’d made. With Mark’s people not explaining why carrying the three Amicitas main engines to Schiaparelli was no longer a priority, she’d decided not to make the four jumbo batteries originally scheduled for today. Besides, skipping those meant she could spare a little juice for experiments on the rainbow crystals.
Over the past few sols she and Mark had devised and carried out several experiments with the accidental enchantments in the crystals. The results both comforted and baffled her, for various reasons.
Experiment #1: Did the rainbow crystals store mana? According to Dragonfly’s thaumometer, yes, though even the ones in the center of the cluster, those which couldn’t infect other crystals anymore, didn’t store much. They were vastly less efficient than the purpose-enchanted batteries, if the average readout was an indicator.
Experiment #2: Did a crystal have to be growing out of the wall to be infected? Answer: no. Five crystal chunks cut from Lunch Buffet had been set in places where they could sit on top of certain rainbow crystals; all but the smallest had been enchanted within two days of being put there.
Experiment #3: Did a crystal have to be touching an infected crystal to be infected? Answer: too soon to be conclusive about it, but the crystals set a ponylength away, out in the open, hadn’t been infected in four sols of sitting there.
Experiment #4: Was there a size limit for the enchantment? Answer, based on observation: yes. Crystals smaller than Mark’s thumb remained in the field of rainbow crystals which hadn’t been altered. Possibly the enchantment couldn’t all fit. With careful examination (squinting) Starlight could make out a few random-looking traces of magic, but not the strange random patterns of the full enchantment.
Experiment #5: Would an already enchanted crystal be infected? Answer: apparently not. Starlight had laid the battery enchantment on a hoof-sized crystal and stuck it between two larger rainbow crystals. It still sat there, unaffected, three days later. More observation was warranted, but it looked like the batteries and the solar relays were safe. (It had occurred to her that she could probably think of ways to make a viral enchantment that would attack the batteries and sun crystals. It also occurred to her that Mars was not the place to even consider trying it.)
Experiment #6 (today): Would a rainbow crystal take an enchantment? Answer: surprisingly, yes, though with difficulty and with much reduced efficacy. Starlight had enchanted two of the rainbow crystals with a standard lighting enchantment. Now they glowed, if only feebly.
Experiment #7 (also today, using one of the infected crystals from Experiment #2): Could a rainbow crystal be dis-enchanted? Answer: not completely. As with any enchantment, bits of it tended to persist. But the portion of the random tangle of enchantments Starlight had broken had apparently broken the whole thing; the crystal was still a rainbow of colors, but the pattern hadn’t shifted.
Experiment #8 (begun today, incomplete): Would the enchantment affect non-crystalline rocks?
Experiment #9 (also begun today): If you enchant a rainbow crystal, would the added enchantment propagate along with the random one?
For this experiment the remaining three cut crystals Starlight had allowed to be infected were placed in small sample boxes Mark provided. One was filled with other cut crystals; this would be the control. One was also filled with cut crystals, but the infected crystal had the light-producing added enchantment. The last infected crystal was placed in a box of random non-crystalline surface rocks collected midway through the rover drive out to the cave that morning. In two or three days, they’d know the results.
Mark took the last photo of the post-magic round for today, charting the continued expansion of the rainbow crystal field and documenting the start of the three experiment boxes. “Do you want to write up the results?” he asked. “Or should I?”
“I’d better do it,” Starlight said. “I’m the one who’s been translating our concepts into English for your scientists. And I also have to send reports home.”
“Suit yourself,” Mark said. “Just let me know when you’re done so we can do the reading for today. It’s the last chapter of The Two Towers.”
Starlight shuddered. Spitfire and Dragonfly had turned out to be right on the money with their predictions, but the giant monstrous spider had come out of nowhere. She had nothing against spiders- the star spiders that hung around the half-restored Castle of the Two Sisters were cute and unusually friendly for denizens of the Everfree- but she drew the line at giant pony-eating monster spiders.
They discussed the final chapter of The Two Towers on the rover drive home, after renewing the previous day’s agreement that Dragonfly keep her big mouth shut.
In Starlight’s opinion there was too much Shelob, which is to say, there was some Shelob. But at least she hadn’t won. On the other hoof, Samwise hadn’t won, either…
“I feel so bad for Sam right now,” she said. “I’ve felt like that so many times- so many days when it seems like every decision I make is wrong.”
“Welcome to Planet Fireball,” the dragon rumbled ruefully.
“Welcome to Aragorn,” Spitfire added. “Remember the boat place? The orc attack?”
“But that came out okay in the end,” Starlight said. “Sam’s all by himself, Frodo’s a prisoner of Sauron’s orcs, and Gollum’s around somewhere getting ready to kill them. What can Sam do to make that right?”
“It’ll be a while before you find out,” Mark said. “The last book of the story, Return of the King, begins by going back to Gandalf and Pippin.”
“Oh, come on!” Cherry Berry protested. “Another switch? I don’t even remember what they were doing!”
“Riding to Gondor,” Starlight muttered. “But the thing is, I can’t see what Sam could have done differently. Letting Frodo get taken was the wrong move in hindsight, but if he’d stayed and tried to fight a whole squad of orcs? That would have been worse.”
“Sometimes you don’t have good choices,” Mark said quietly. “And nobody knows the future.” He paused. “Er, do people know the future? Where you come from, I mean?”
“Some say Sunbutt does,” Fireball said. “All those pony future stories come from someplace, yeah?”
“Sunbutt?” Mark asked.
“He means Princess Sky-and-Stuff,” Starlight muttered. “In a very crude and insensitive way.”
“It part of my charming personality,” Fireball said primly.
“Hint, Fireball,” Starlight replied, “don’t take charm lessons from Mr. Furley.”
“Starlight, why don’t you just use her pony name?” Mark asked. “You don’t call me Dedicated-to-Mars anymore.”
“For us names have meaning,” Starlight replied. “Many ponies change their names once they know what they’re going to do with their lives. For us a name tells other people who we are.”
“All right,” Mark said. “So what does ‘Starlight Glimmer’ tell us about you? That you’re almost invisible on a moonless night?”
“Er… um… look out for that rock!”
It was the same rock the rover drove over without so much as a scraping sound every day, so Mark didn’t bother to look. “Fine, the meanings of names are important to ponies,” he said. “But not to humans. So why not just use the pony version?”
“We did a couple times, remember?” Starlight said. “You can’t pronounce it.” And if you shift the vowel sound you can't pronounce, depending on which vowel you substitute, you either get nonsense, the word for a strong aroma, or the word teat. And knowing you, Mark, the minute you got to Equestria it'd be Princess Teat this and Princess Teat that, and Celestia would be very disappointed in us all...
She tried hard not to imagine how much Luna would laugh about it, and failed.
Before the conversation could continue its concussed wandering, the rover arrived back at the Hab. Inside, there was a message waiting for them on the main computer chat window, one the castaways had been expecting since dawn.
[06:41] SYSTEM: ERROR - Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold – Unable to Display
[07:44] SYSTEM: ERROR - Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold – Unable to Display
[08:47] SYSTEM: ERROR - Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold – Unable to Display
[09:51] SYSTEM: ERROR - Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold – Unable to Display
[10:54] SYSTEM: ERROR - Signal Corruption Exceeds Recovery Threshold – Unable to Display
[11:57] JPL: All right, Mark, here’s the short version. Our work on modifying the Ares IV MAV has hit a roadblock. Turning the MAV descent stage into a zeroth ascent stage doesn’t work- the built-in engines are just too weak. Even with your friends’ engines running full blast, it wouldn’t do more than get you about a kilometer off the surface, and there’s a significant chance of plowing back into Mars during staging.
We considered putting the engines on the first ascent stage, but they’d burn out less than halfway through its burn, which means they’re practically negative delta-v unless you can make them disintegrate on command. We could throttle them back to half power and give up some efficiency, but that doesn’t give the ship the push it needs to break away from Mars.
We need to know: is there any way to make the engines lighter? Is there any way to increase thrust, even if it means burning out sooner? Is there any way to decouple or, if all else fails, destroy the engines and batteries once they’re used up?
Please ask your friends to study the problem. If we can’t use the pony engines, then we’ll either have to use the Sparkle Drive in atmosphere or scrap the Drive and go for a really risky all-or-nothing Hermes rendezvous. I can’t tell you how much we dislike either option. So please, give us something to work with.
This chat is having serious trouble with the solar flare activity just now. Thankfully Hermes isn’t in the path of any CMEs. Respond tomorrow via the pony radio- we want to see if the signal’s any clearer. We’ll be listening from 0830 hours Hab time.
By the time Starlight finished reading the chat message for the second time, the others had taken off and put away their suits, except for Dragonfly. The changeling had kept her suit so she could tap out a report home via the suit water spigot.
Starlight considered the problem. Mana batteries required some orderly molecular structure- ideally crystals. And those crystals had to be able to withstand a lot of punishment, if they were going to ride a rocket. There weren’t going to be any weight savings there. Yes, the batteries in the Sparkle Drive’s power array had crumbled to dust, but only under a massive sudden power demand. Maybe she could figure out a way to do that deliberately, but she didn’t think so.
As for making the engines lighter- ha! It had taken years to get them as efficient as they were. It was nearly impossible to create an enchantment for telekinesis. The spell, that most basic spell, practically required a mind to guide it. And anyway, the spell required both a point of origin and a target. Of course, a unicorn with magic to burn could make the two points the same and self-levitate, but experiments in that direction had been almost lethally unsuccessful. Yes, it made the enchanted object ballistic, but nopony had figured out how to control the direction… or how to turn it off before it hit a wall and, if you were very lucky, shattered into uselessness.
The three experiments that had decided to go up might keep going forever...
It had been Twilight who’d decided to focus on converting magic into thrust. That used a variant of a repulsor field spell, much like the forcefields that protected the Crystal Empire. The engine contained the spell, twisted just so inside its coils, and the twisting produced exhaust that could be directed using engine bells or nozzles. Of course, using an ordinary repulsor spell, either a field or a beam, wouldn’t work, because the ship would need something to push against, and space didn’t have a lot of those…
Push. Push. Push.
Dr. Kapoor had used the word. That was what a rocket did, really. The explosion in the reaction chamber pushed outward in all directions. But there was engine bell and rocket in the way in certain directions, and no resistance in other directions. Net result: the ship got pushed in the direction you presumably wanted to go.
But something about the word push gripped Starlight’s mind. There was an idea there, desperate to get out.
Suppose… a repulsor spell wouldn’t do much good in space, but the MAV wasn’t in space yet. And various force field spells and enchantments made it clear that, although you didn’t get telekinesis without a living mind, you could enchant something to kick other things away just fine.
What if… what if we used repulsor spells… to push the MAV away from Mars?
It could actually be more efficient than the engines. A lot more.
“Dragonfly?”
“Sssh,” Dragonfly said. “Composing message.”
“Break off. Send stand by,” Starlight said. “I have an idea.”
AMICITAS: Disregard prior signal, stand by, over.
ESA: Is something wrong, over?
AMICITAS: SG – urgent request you test following hypothesis: that repulsorlift spell with large mana battery can lift and launch spacecraft. Urgently need to know maximum distance of effect, whether lift efficiency is stable or degrades over distance, etc. Could potentially save twenty tons on escape rocket weight, over.
ESA: TS – good idea. Do you know how to enchant repulsor spells? Over.
AMICITAS: SG – affirmative. Over.
ESA: MD – I think the spell will lose strength by the square of the distance between caster and target. Really inefficient. But we’ll try it. Over.
AMICITAS: Thanks. Thanks. Out.
The instant she’d finished tapping the sign-off, Starlight leaped back to her hooves. “Mark!” she shouted. “We’re going back to the cave after lunch!”
“What??” Mark asked. “What for?”
“I still have four batteries to make!” Starlight said. “And with the work I have to do, there’s not a moment to spare!”
She'd have to drain eight of the remaining batteries to make it happen, which would mean no expansion of magic field time for quite a while, but she didn't care.
She wasn’t going to miss doing the right thing this time.
If necessary, Starlight Glimmer would do all the things.
Not sure why, was a very good point.
*Sniff sniff*
Ya' smell that?
I smell [PYLONS].
Hrm, self-propagating magic. There's a use for that, I can smell it. but what? Repulsion spells for orbital thrust? Ingenious!
In other news, yup, mentioning good and evil in a public internet forum led to a huge slap-fight. Who'd have thought it? But now we shall rightly get back to pastel colored ponies. which are, as everyone knows, Serious Business.
I love the scientific mindset displayed here, and PROPERLY.
Hmm. So rainbowcrystals are kind of enchanted with a self spreading enchantment, but limited to large enough crystals, require no existing crystal, act as crappy but functional mana batteries, and finally cannot be disenchanted.
Obviously will be important later....
And using Telekinesis for thrust. Well shield repulsion or something, but suffers from distance. I wonder if you can apply it to the general exhaust to gain more efficiency to the existing human engines.
OH. All the stuff about spells that dont cast themselves, and the rainbow crystals are enchantments that enchant more crystals. I see wherr this is going. Maybe.
My brain just suggested trying to create a propigating enchantment that would repulse the ship and spread across mars. This is clearly a bad idea.
Did the.... Flim flam's machine... Require them to visibly power it when running? Were their horns glowing I mean?
Was it a come-to-life spell?
I can't think of anything else that might be self-casting from the show. Maybe the weather factory had something.
So "By Celestia's Teats!" is a rather punny swear in equestria.
Repulsor spells, eh? So, basically, they're going to Iron Man it into space. Mark still gets to fly like Iron Man despite this being the book version.
9007864
Oh gods. I get enough of that from Fallout Equestria.
I used to wonder why so many translation errors resulted in something vulgar. Obviously, this is because of the sheer quantity of euphemism s required as people keep banning them, so odds are a mistranslation will point at one.
Kinda funny. Has anyone explained that Princess-Sky-And-Everything-In-It has a sun as her talent-mark? Or did it wierdly translate to Cutie mark anyway?
9007864 It rhymes.
Easy there, GlimGlam. That's the sort of attitude that's liable to cause more problems than it solves...
9007857 Yes, the Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 5000 required active unicorn operation. It wasn't autonomous.
9007818 Well, I still like it for this reason. I used to read legends and mythology in public school libraries a LOT, and most of them were written about as dry and stiff as Tolkien at his worst. So you're plodding along through that sort of thing... and then a couple of ordinary guys just come walking across the stage, talking about food and maybe having a smoke and oh, hello there mister talking tree, very pleasant day, did you know you're very tall?
The hobbits, except for maybe Frodo, bring things down to Earth. The worst parts are the parts that generally go a long time without a hobbit popping up his curly-haired head and asking what's for breakfast. The contrast is wonderful, but it also improves the context; you get to see mostly ordinary, mostly relatable people thrown into literally epic situations.
9007876 It was probably explained off-screen not long after Starlight first dropped the bombshell about "we have these two princesses, see, who raise and lower the sun and the moon, where are yours?"
Wild question but, if they're going to modify the engines to "push" off Mars and thus gain more efficiency out of them... could they modify the engines to "push" off the MAV and leave them still sitting on the ground?
Because something even better than a high efficiency zeroth stage is a zeroth stage that's weightless because you leave it on the ground :P
The closest analog of the proposed magic repulsion thruster might be laser ablation thrust, but this has some advantage since there is no ablative material mass to haul from the ground. If the repulsion field can be tightly focused or even columnated, things are going to be looking up!
If the repulsor field was local, then it would be Cavourite?
Instead if its inverse square, the trick is getting the initial radius as large as possible, after all, if it starts at a metre push, then by a kilometer height its dropped to parts per million. but to be orbital capable would have to be a hundred metres accross at nearly opaque initial trigger?
If the big battery disintegrated through power overload between dimentions, then couldnt thouusands of small crystcells working like a solid fuel core be overloaded layer after layer and their dust be reaction mass thrown out by the repulsor spell or straight heat spell in them depending on minimum size for a given spell complexity?
Of course, Twilights gravity spell might be a repulsor spell that uses spacetime as reaction mass? That is, the universe?
If the rainbow chaos spell cant be contained as a whole in crystals below a given size, what about parts of the spell in different smaller crystals in the same vicinity? Thats a lot of tiny quartz crystals can maybe take a fraction of a function, but chaos systems can take very little resources for a single element?
So, Starlight theorized Star Wars tech
9007878
By the breast of Celeste!
Starlight Glimmer (and science) in a nutshell.
9007908 It would lose power really quickly as the MAV ascended (effectiveness decreases by the square of the distance), whereas the MAV could push against Mars's atomsphere and keep things nice and close until they ran out of air. Potentially useful, but not enough by itself.
9007855
Need to know if the magic is spreading to create more of itself or if it is taking in surrounding magic as a fuel source to propagate its pattern.
The way to test this is to take an infected crystal and an uninfected crystal and move them to a location away from the hab and cave (and therefore away from all ambient magic).
If it is creating more of its own magic then it might be usable for that, but if it is using the surrounding magic then it would be worthless in creating propulsion anywhere around Mars.
I haven't been keeping up on the comments lately. Did I go and miss a good flame war?
Ah, I noticed you referenced the "pony names translation" thing from a day or two ago.
"[15:30] WATNEY: About fucking time."
What was that about?
"Turning the MAV descent state into a zeroth ascent"
"Turning the MAV descent stage into a zeroth ascent"?
9007934
All hail Princess Tits!
Starlight's right, Luna would laugh her head off.
...
I'm not sure if this pun was intentional or not...
9007926
hmmn, closer to Iron Man i think, the only problem will be finding the Vibranium to get the ARC reactors to work for powering them...
Request:
Don't have the rainbow rocks that suddenly just appeared be the solution for the problem that suddenly just appeared. If pony ingenuity solves the problem, fine. If human ingenuity solves the problem, fine.
Deus ex machina...not so much.
Ideally, a collimated beam is a bundle of parallel magic rays perfectly lined up along an optical line-of-sight (LOS) between a transmitter and target, which could be the rocket's exhaust bell(s)? If the magic were unaffected by rocket exhaust and a link generated between source and target to increase accuracy, a serious long term boost might be achieved. Or am I just full of fake magi-science bull spit?
9007968 Mark was frustrated at how many times his outbound message glitched.
9007917
It's actually most reminiscent of a theoretical engine design called a photonic laser thruster that's basically a modified photon drive; you take a mirror and a spacecraft, then fire photons out the back of the spacecraft.
The photons hit the mirror and bounce off (losing a tiny bit of their energy), pushing the mirror back.
Then the photons bounce back and hit your spaceship, pushing it forward, and bouncing back.
Then the photons hit the mirror again (and so on)
The end result isn't reactionless, since the mirror and the spacecraft are a pair that conserves momentum. But it's much more efficient than a normal photon drive since you push off each photon many times. The spacecraft is "pushing" against the mirror, just at a distance.
Of course, it's more imagined as a deep space engine since the thrust you get is still absolutely tiny because photons. Starlight's system uses magic to turn it into a (hopefully) effective launch system.
9007960
Worse.
If it's not creating magic, then it's absorbing magic that could be going into the batteries.
At the moment, with only a small area 'infected', the amount of mana being radiated out from the cave farm can't be caught by everything. If left unchecked, this could result in an inhibition of battery charge. Kind of like clouds blocking the sun from a solar cell. That's Bad.
But at the same time, there's potential. If starlight can weave a channeling enchantment into the spreading crystal, she could potentially turn the cave into a full spherical mana collector for the farm. Just consider, she was, by her own estimate, lobbing 'Twilight vs Tirek' power at Dragonfly's cocoon from two weeks of power collected by batteries who hardly occupy a fraction of the spherical surface area around the farm. If the entire cave could be turned into a big collector that's channeled into an ever growing bank of batteries, it would be the equivalent of making a small Dyson Sphere around a star. Except the star is a potato and alfalfa farm with some cherry trees for good measure, emitting magical power instead of radiation.
And there's a lot they could do with that much more raw magical power.
9008035
It's not like a cloud blocking the sun because the collectors are on the same side of the crystals as the magic source. I think it would only be a problem if the crystals were between the plants and the batteries.
9007960
BUT it is incredibly useful on Earth. Right now, according to all evidence, their is an energy field on earth, that is created by life, that we have never detected and thus far have no tools to manipulate. Its not like Equestria where its ever present, and our life is worse at generating it, but its still probably global wide on earth, except MAYBE the South and North pole.
Given the complexities of international trade, over dimensions, and the mess of power plays on earth, its entirely possible the ponies will take one look at the geopolitical situation and go, "Nope. Thanks for the help, but we aren't going to get involved in this mess."
So we would be back to square one.
One piece of viral crystal however, is a launch point to magic research. The magic is in a different form. A chaotic one true, but a far more concentrated one then on earth, with MAYBE the exception of the most life concentrated places on the planet (like the Amazon). If we get one piece of that rock back to earth, Scientists are going to go magic crazy trying to find a way to detect and interact with it....and possibly even get around Earth's life generating very little magic compared to Equestria.
9007926
Oh, they better be careful. Tibanna gas is super flammable! I should know, I failed that stupid mission enough times.
9008016
It hadn't stopped glitching yet, though, had it? That sounds like something he might say after it finally went through.
The repulser is a Star Wars reference isn't it. And yeah, falls off with the square of the distance makes sense.
9008007
Don't worry, I have a feeling they're just going to keep Cherry's trees alive once they leave Mars.
9007878
I appreciate that way too much.
9007880
There's a reason her middle name is "The Cause and Solution to All Life's Problems". There's also a reason she keeps it to herself.
you know what I just realized if we get a working way to detect magic we humans could in something like the Hubble to confirm life in our own universe since it CONFIRMED to only exist on planets with life on it. This method would only work in the pony universe only if they filter out the background magic which wouldn't be to hard if its anything like fiftering the light coming from the reflection from the planet from the light from its parent star then putting the data in a machine to hopefully discover if the planet's atmosphere has free flowing Oxygen. article about that here
Actually I think Celestia would be immensely amused. It fits her trollish nature to allow it.
Okay, that is not how you send messages with recovery data. If you have a high level of data corruption, you don't try to re-send the same message/recovery data bundle over and over; you increase the amount of recovery data to compensate for the amount of corruption and, if necessary, keep sending additional recovery packets until the original message can be reconstructed.
For example, if you see an average packet loss of 50%, you expect to need approximately as many recovery packets as message packets. Half the message gets wiped out and half the recovery data as well, and then you reconstruct the missing half of the message from the surviving half of the recovery data. If it turns out that either the message or the recovery data was hit a little harder than expected, and the recipient doesn't have enough recovery packets to make up the missing message packets, you don't start the whole process over, but just send more recovery data, starting with the packages that got corrupted last time, and adding more as needed.
If you have a signal loss of 70%, you'd have to send so many recovery packets that the 30% of them that survive are equal to the 70% of message packets you need to reconstruct. That'd be 7/3 or 2.33… times the size of the original message.
One experiment that I missed among the list was a test whether the spread of the self-replicating enchantment to new crystals uses up magic, eating into the amount that remains to charge the batteries. Unless, of course, that is so self-evidently true that it needs no testing.
If the answer is yes, and the magic drain is significant enough to hamper recharging times, then they definitely have to stop the spread with some sort of fire-break around the already enchanted patch. As the circumference of the patch grows, the amount of new crystals being enchanted grow geometrically along with it, which means greater and greater amount of magic being used for self-replication rather than recharging.
9007441
Well, the results of that experiment are important. Even if some people already knew it, it is way to easy or convenient to forget. Think how (some of) the Nuremberg trails would have been handled differently, if they had considered these results.
Hmm repulsion field + water teleport = no need for propellant.
9008105 Does this mean that Starlight’s middle name is Alcohol because of her nickname as the “Cause and Solution to All Life's Problems”?
9007870
He Iron Mans it in the book too though, doesn't he?
starcraft meet mlp and the maretian crossover!
and this time they would know there doing a starcraft thing and let them know of E-sport and give that old Minotaur a heart problem seeing that video games have taken over the computer world!
9007886
I always guessed that was the actual con they were running. The machine worked as advertised and seemed to make fairly good product. I bet they were only selling the machine, but not the spells to run it (and they were specific enough that you had to know them and how to use them to make it work).
9008016
i have to ask one thing..... will they get to see elon musk?
9008211
Iron manning it would be too easy, with all the pony suits and crystals and such.
But no, in the book, no iron man.
Even Hermessing it would be plausible. Unfortunately for them, none of them seem to have read “The Martian” by Andy Weir or seen the movie with the same title.
Did Twilight ever experiment with sending Xenon over crystal link?
Getting Hermes more Fuel would allow it to get into a lower orbit, facilitating a pickup.
9008232
As poorly thought out as that episode was for trying to be a crazy moral mashup of John Henry Irons meets ponies meets 'don't be lazy', I wouldn't put it past Flim and Flam being so determined to be get-rich-quick conmen that they completely overlooked a legitimately golden business opportunity of the SSCS6K. No special spells needed. They out-conned themselves.
They were so busy trying to take all the profits at first, then trying to flat out steal the whole farm, they threw away what could have been a perfect supplier. Everyone who has even a lick of business sense and has seen that episode has discussed that set of mistakes ad nauseum.
Never mind how badly they botched the moral. But that's a divergence from the topic here.
I kind of thought Twilight’s gravity spell might be a possible Solution.
Use the pony rockets, or just one pony rocket, to make a tiny rocket which they fire off just ahead of the Mav.
The tiny rocket then uses the Gravity Spell to create a high G field directly above the Mav, allowing for the Mav to launch with less thrust...
And, if that’s not the way that spell works, could Starlight use it to make the MAV weigh less? Even for only the first few moments of thrust it would save a ton of fuel.
Maybe they should ask someone from Minovia?
I'm also reminded of that WORM crossover where Twilight permanently reverses gravity on Crawler... and the similar solution Joseph Joestar pulled on accident with Kars.