Sol 483
AMICITAS FLIGHT THREE – MISSION DAY 492
ARES III SOL 483
Spitfire, in her past career as leader of the Wonderbolts, had carried two full-grown ponies in the air along with her… on Equus.
The combined weight of her spacesuit, the extra spacesuit battery strapped to the outside of her backpack, the two ship mana batteries harnessed around the barrel of her suit like a mining donkey’s saddlebags, and the two pieces of quartz attached to her chest added up to about two full-grown ponies. Unfortunately, Spitfire was on Mars, with its alien atmosphere which, if you had to limit yourself to a single word when describing it, would be, “less.”
And its magic environment, which under the same rules would be described as, “zero.”
“Okay, mission briefing,” Starlight Glimmer said, adjusting the magic battery on her own back. “We’ve disconnected your suit thruster system. Remember that. You do NOT have thrusters. We don’t want another storm to come back and hit us in two weeks, and anyway you can’t spare the magic power.”
“Right. No thrusters,” Spitfire nodded.
“These,” Starlight Glimmer said, tapping the bits of quartz on Spitfire’s chest, “are force field projectors. The first one is for launch, during the sub-sonic portion of your flight. It should keep the dust from destroying your suit before you build up a shockwave strong enough to keep it away. The second one is in case your suit breaches. Twilight Sparkle has been told to keep overriding your life support safeties in case of a breach. If your suit breaches, you activate this and come straight down at once if you can.
“The force field will keep out dust and hold in air, but it won’t hold up to anything much more energetic. If you see a mountain up there, don’t play tag with it.”
“Ha ha,” Spitfire said sarcastically.
“Once you’re supersonic, you must remove the first force field projector by hoof,” Starlight said. “One cable will be loose. You’ll need to attach that cable to the second projector to activate it. I just hope you don’t need it.”
You hope? Spitfire thought. Aloud she merely said, “I understand.”
“Okay, moving on to the suit proper,” Starlight said. “We used the flaps we cut out of your suit to line the leading edges of your wings. They’ll take the most punishment and protect the seams of the rest of the sleeves.”
“The resin covering the wing-sleeves hasn’t cured yet,” Dragonfly groaned from a flight couch. Unlike the others, each of whom had their suits on and at least one magic battery to carry out, Dragonfly was staying in the ship. Having spent the entire afternoon and evening horking up goo for the flight harness and the space suit modifications, then actually making the spacesuit mods with Fireball’s help, she was literally both sick and tired. “That’s the only reason they still flex. The goo is still liquid around the fabric core. A small breach should be self-sealing. But don’t tempt it. This isn’t your regular flight suit.”
“I know,” Spitfire said. “My flight suit has naked wings.” She’d actually tried to argue for leaving her wings open to the elements. She hadn’t been voted down so much as shouted down. Dragonfly had made the one argument against the notion that Spitfire considered valid; the only way to keep an airtight seal on wing slits would be to glue the suit to her skin. No seal meant no air… and no life.
“I really wish we could have used the spare Hab canvas for these,” Starlight continued, tapping the spots just above the bulky mana batteries where the wing-sleeves had been added. With Spitfire’s wings folded, the new fabric barely showed. “But Hab canvas blocks magic, according to the tests we ran on the rainbow crystals. Changeling goo doesn’t, or at least no more than ordinary fabric does.”
“I make work,” Spitfire snapped.
“Anyway. If you have a suit breach, you abort. When the big batteries run out, you hit the quick-release.” Starlight tapped- very carefully- the harness buckle directly under Spitfire’s barrel. “I hate to lose these batteries, but better them than you.”
“Won’t lose ‘em,” Spitfire said.
“When you abort, or when you succeed completely, you activate suit power,” Starlight said. “That’ll give you a beacon back to the ship. We’ll be running the telepresence system for just that reason. But even with the double battery on the backpack, once you’re on suit power your flight time will be measured in seconds. Come straight back as fast as you can. Don’t waste effort slowing down or braking.”
“According to NASA,” Mark added, “wings in general become useless on Mars at any speed much below two hundred meters per second. That is, any wings smaller than a football field.”
“Right. Just come at us as level as possible. I’ll be waiting to grab you telekinetically.”
“Got it.”
“How are the connections?” Dragonfly asked.
Spitfire gave thought to the two little wires the changeling had added to her suit, ending in biomonitor pads stolen from the undergarment of Mark’s spare suit. The adhesive on the pads tugged at the fur between her wings and made her skin itch abominably underneath. But she’d learned many years before to stay perfectly still no matter how she itched, after her first dose of KP duty at the Academy. “Solid,” she said.
“Okay,” Cherry Berry said. “Booster pad check?”
Mark checked the improvised flight couch- really just the largest flat bit of scrap metal from the small supply they’d brought in Rover 2, with three small repulsor targets bolted to it. “All solid,” he said.
“Booster check?”
Starlight squinted at three bits of quartz, about the size of a paperback book each. “Enchantments look good,” she said.
“Okay. Suit up,” Cherry Berry said, lifting her helmet. “Fireball, Starlight and I go out first. Then Mark and Spitfire. Let’s do it.”
A pale blue sphere surrounded the rear of the Whinnybago. Flying dust and grit swirled around it. Inside it, a unicorn, an earth pony and a dragon waited as a human helped a badly overburdened pegasus navigate the boarding ladder that extended from the airlock almost to the ground.
The five went about their tasks in almost total silence, speaking only to confirm tasks completed. Fireball held a mana battery in one claw and Starlight Glimmer in the other, allowing the unicorn to keep her hooves on the battery terminals and focus on maintaining the force field. Mark and Cherry put Spitfire on the improvised launch platform and carried it, slowly and carefully, to the same cairns that had been used to launch Operation Cloudbuster the sol before. Once the launch platform was in place, they wired up the three boosters to the single battery dedicated to the launch. Two more batteries stood ready if and when the battery Starlight was using ran out of power.
Spitfire, in all of this, had nothing to do but lie back, wait, and think about exactly what a horrible idea this had been. She had, on a couple of rare occasions, barely managed an ordinary sonic boom. The only genuine rainbooms she’d ever witnessed had been performed by Rainbow Dash and Princess Twilight Sparkle; she herself had never, never gone that fast in her life. Not even close.
I’m about to fly what would be Mock 2 back home, she thought. Three times the local speed of sound. In a dust storm. And if anything breaks on my suit…
Oh, Faust, oh Faust, I am about to die.
No. Calm. We’ve taken every possible precaution. Multiple backup systems.
I am wearing a space suit that we took a pair of shears to. We patched it with changeling puke and scrap clothing. Then we strapped over two hundred and fifty pounds of rocks to it, so that I will not only have the aerodynamic properties of a brick, I’ll be a bucking FAT brick.
I am SOOOOO gonna die.
Okay. Fine. You’re gonna die, Spitfire. But your crew isn’t. Keep your mind on the task. Beyond that? What happens, happens.
“How are you doing, Spitfire?” Mark asked over the suit comms.
“All go,” she replied, her voice calm and steady as she’d trained to be.
“Okay,” Mark said. “We’re pulling back for launch. You’re about to lose the force field. Are you ready?”
“Yes, Mark.”
“Clear skies and fair winds, Spitfire.” Where the buck had Cherry Berry picked up that old pegasus farewell? Probably an adventure book somewhere; nopony talked like that anymore.
Unless they thought somepony was about to die.
Oh, yeah.
“Yes, commander, clear skies, that’s the plan,” she said out loud.
“Counting down,” Starlight said. “Thirty. Twenty-nine.”
The wall of the force field flowed past and around Spitfire, and she suddenly felt the soft brush of talcum-light Martian dust running across her spacesuit. Right now, she thought, all it would take would be one well-placed bit of gravel, right in my faceplate, and it would all be over.
“Twenty. Nineteen. Eighteen.”
“Suit comms off at t minus six. Force field at t minus three, Spitfire,” Cherry Berry called.
“Copy t minus three,” Spitfire replied.
“Thirteen. Twelve. Eleven.”
“Back in a few minutes, guys.” She’d spent half the previous night thinking of what her last words would be pre-launch. Part of that had been because the phrase had to be in English, but only a small part. Most of it had been because she hadn’t been able to think of anything except mush or empty bluster. This was- what was Starlight’s word?- banal, but it had a certain class, a clean simplicity.
As a dying mare’s last words, she could do worse. She switched off suit power.
“Six. Five. Four.”
On three Spitfire’s hoof hit the toggle switch, and the two big batteries came to life. A smaller version of the same force field Starlight Glimmer had used popped up around her. At the same time magic poured through her, in a strength she couldn’t remember ever having before. She felt like all of Equestria was pouring into her wings.
She’d never touched a magic battery’s terminals during operation before. She could see, now, how Starlight might find it addictive, here and now.
And then zero came, and the mighty hoof of Faust slid under her back and shoved her towards the skies.
Centrifuge training, back at Cape Friendship, came back to her instantly, as did the Dizzitron at the Academy. She clenched her abdomen, breathed shallowly, forced the darkness at the edges of her vision to stay there. Somewhere off unimportant, a voice counted upwards, sounding urgent, as if shouting a number made it more real somehow.
Ignore it. Focus on the mission.
The forcefield deformed around her, pushing closer to her as the forces pushing against it intensified. Just beyond it she could see dust being pushed aside, not by the force field, but by the inability of the air immediately in front of her and the launch platform to get out of the way.
Almost time. Be ready.
And then, just as suddenly as Faust’s hoof had lifted her up, it was gone. Free-fall.
Instantly Spitfire’s newly sleeved wings opened- just a little, for opening them completely at this speed would have been suicidal. She raised a hoof into the sky, slapped away the force field crystal with her other hoof, felt the magic in her wings…
… and pushed.
The forcefield died, and several kilometers above the surface of Mars, nothing remained but a storm and a single pegasus carrying two massive batteries and over seven hundred meters per second of momentum.
Spitfire’s first task was to level off while maintaining speed. That took almost half a minute. Even at the absurd speed, with magic flooding her wings, there wasn’t that much air for them to get purchase on. Besides, this was a completely unknown environment. No pegasus had ever flown under conditions like this before, anywhere, ever.
But though the sky was alien, it wasn’t totally unfamiliar. Spitfire had flown high altitude and high speed enough that these conditions, potentially lethal as they were, had some familiar qualities.
She could work with it.
But the clock was ticking. She had to get to work.
Without realizing it, she’d turned automatically into the wind. Good. Counter-flying the rotation of a storm was the way you broke it… you and a couple dozen other Wonderbolts, or a couple hundred ordinary weatherponies. But since there was only her, she’d have to make up the difference with sheer speed.
Even with the batteries pouring magic through her, she couldn’t maintain seven hundred meters per second for long in level flight. She’d have to angle down, let Mars’s weak gravity help her.
She found herself panting. Had the suit lost integrity? No- no alarms yet. This was just exhaustion, being out of shape, and that lost lung capacity from the last medical exams.
No time for weakness. Either this works, or the crew dies. Pony up and do the job.
Spitfire’s eyes caught a glimmer of light. There, above her, was a blazing streak of orange flame, floating in the sky like…
… like a contrail. Like her contrail, except that instead of smoke, she was trailing fire behind her. A ring of fire. A spiral of fire.
No. A corkscrew of fire. Because Mars, you bucking rock with delusions of grandeur, you just got screwed.
Spitfire grit her teeth, angled a little downward, and flapped her wingtips, pushing for the heart of the storm.
“Oh my God.”
Starlight had just switched to the second magic battery, the force field flickering for only a moment, when Mark pointed skywards and said the words. There, miles and miles overhead, a flickering thread of light shone through the dark haze of the dust storm.
“She’s doing it!” Cherry Berry cheered. “Go for it, Spitfire! You can do it!”
Unnoticed by the observers on the ground, the launch platform crashed to the ground behind them, sending up a thin spattering of chipped rocks from the impact.
The air grew thicker, and so did the dust. Despite that, Spitfire knew she was slowing down, losing momentum, losing power.
She couldn’t help it. For all the power in her wings, she couldn’t really feel the air around her through the sticky, horrid wing sleeves. She wondered how well an earth pony farmer would do with all four hooves in galoshes, trying to work the fields.
But she could feel a little, secondhand. Her instincts told her where the currents of the weather were going, how they could be distrupted, how she could bust them. She plowed through them, always turning her leading hoof into the greatest point of resistance, each descending loop growing tighter around the center of the storm’s circulation.
And above, unseen by her, gaps in the storm appeared, spreading out from her contrail, which persisted in its glow as if the Martian air itself was burning.
And then she felt a tug on her wingtip, an imbalance in the huge, bulky batteries, each bigger than her head, strapped to her sides.
There. That’s the core of the storm.
Her suit alarms went off- suit breach. The life support cut out, then cut back in. In, out, in, out, in… and stopped. Breach self-sealed, for the moment. Good.
She felt another eddy, a downdraft in her wake. Yes. It’s weakened. It’s breaking.
Time to finish it.
She rolled to the right, nosed down, and dove down through the heart of the storm.
The trail of fire followed her down.
The castaways stared up as the corkscrew of light grew tighter, and tighter, and then…
… stabbed.
The light plunged down through the storm, descending faster and faster. As it plunged, it expanded, sending rings of condensed dust pluming outwards from the center of rotation to descend in a slow shower on the ground below.
Patches of ordinary Mars-red sky began to appear through the breaks in the storm overhead. Even as they watched, the red patches became red-ringed patches of pink, and then pink-ringed patches of the same amazing blue they’d experienced for weeks after the first booster test.
And then the plume of fire pulled out of its dive with a terrifying slowness, swinging away from the perpendicular, approaching the ground closer and closer…
… but not quite touching it. Less than a hundred meters overhead, it soared over their position and began to climb again, rising over the now clearly visible rim of Crommelin to the south.
And behind it, mixed with the dust rapidly settling out of the rare Martian atmosphere, fell snowflakes.
The alarms didn’t stop now. Fortunately, the life support wasn’t cutting in and out anymore, either. The tiny part of her mind Spitfire could spare for irrelevancies decided that Twilight Sparkle must be leaning on the override switch constantly. Good for her.
In a way, the suit breach felt like it helped. Spitfire thought she felt a slight improvement in the lift and thrust from her wings. Without that, she didn’t think she could have pulled out of the dive, not with the stupid batteries harnessed to her. The fact that she was gasping for air, her mouth wide open, her lungs laboring, all that was a minor issue.
Whatever. Finish the job. Hold on to all the momentum you can. Keep pushing. Bank around and come in for another strike-
The overwhelming power that had flowed through her wings CEASED.
The laws of physics, which had railed against the flagrant violations the spacesuited pegasus had committed, pounced. Air resistance grabbed at the empty ship batteries, slowing Spitfire below the local speed of sound almost instantly.
She reached for the release buckle… and yanked her hoof away, instead hitting the switch for suit power. She didn’t know where she was in relation to the ship, and she was not going to risk dropping two heavy rocks from the sky onto her friends’ heads.
The suit power came up, providing a water fountain where the big batteries had been a firehose. But it was enough, for the moment, to regain control.
With the suit power came the comms and the nav-ball. She didn’t have the breath to spare for talking, but she could see the nav-ball and the beacon for the ship.
The same part of her mind that had imagined an alicorn princess propping up a wall with one hoof to keep a certain switch closed now noted, with an almost insane clinical detachment, that she’d just missed a perfect bombing shot if she’d wanted to utterly destroy the rover with a hundred kilos of crystal and metal. Even as she thought it, she passed over the rover at a kilometer high and dropping faster and faster.
Two other things ran through Spitfire’s head: Wings become useless when you drop much below two hundred meters per second on Mars, and Once you activate suit power, your flight time can be measured in seconds.
Without really thinking about it, Spitfire spread her wings as wide as they could go, pounding them frantically, in the process pumping air through the breach in her left wing sleeve. Snow condensed out of the leak as soon as it left the hole, trailing a cloud of white behind her where there had been a streak of fire. She banked left and down, using the little power remaining to regain enough speed for her wings to catch enough of the thinning air to make the turn back to the ship.
The red world beneath her turned… turned… so slowly…
It grew closer… fast… faster… faster…
She saw the rover again. More to the point, she saw the cairns where her friends were waiting.
More alarms were going off. The suit breach had gone beyond the life support system’s ability to compensate. Gasping for air wasn’t helping anymore. Panic began rising in her chest, for lack of anything else there to rise.
And then she remembered the second force field.
Flight time measured in seconds. No power to spare.
Buck that!
Spitfire fumbled frantically at her chest with her forehooves, found the loose cable, and jammed it into the plug carved into the little crystal slice.
A pointy bubble appeared around her, streamlined back by the rush of air, thin as it was, around her. She could see herself slowing down in relation to the surface, dragged back by the field’s resistance.
And she could feel air, precious, life-giving air, returning to her lungs as the life support filled up the bubble with air. It felt…
… really, really painful. The inside of her chest felt like she’d inhaled sandpaper.
She felt her wings lose way in the air; she’d slowed down below the speed required to gain lift. All she had left was momentum, and that was a rapidly diminishing resource.
Oh, look. There’s the ground. Hello, ground. Be kind to me when I’m buried in-
She felt something grab her, and in a yank she hadn’t felt since the crash landing all those sols before, she came to a rapid stop some thirty meters above the surface. Then, slowly, she was lowered to the ground, while a large blue bubble of light charged towards her position.
Spitfire let herself flop forward onto her barrel when she touched down. She didn’t have the strength to stand. She couldn’t get the air to stand. She felt herself begin to shake. Everything was cold, horribly cold, despite the warm air blowing from the vents in her suit.
The force field flickered and burst as it merged with the larger one. Figures stood over her. They had voices- the voices had been in her ears for some time now, but they hadn’t seemed really important, no matter how urgent they sounded.
“The left wing is ripped wide open!”
“There’s a pinhole leak in the right wing, too!”
“Spitfire, you idiot! Why the buck do you still have those batteries strapped on!”
“Don’t just stand there, get them off her!”
“Hey.” Was that her voice? She’d always had a rasp to it, but wow. “Told you I’d bring the batteries back.”
“I can’t hold this field much longer! Get the crap off her and get her to the airlock, now!!”
Airlock. Ship. What a good idea.
Spitfire wanted to help, but she hurt, and she was so very…
… very, very…
… tired.
Moving as fast as they could without jarring their burden, the crew carried the unconscious pegasus back to the Whinnybago.
Around them, the shattered, dusty fragments of sky fell.
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Spitfire: literal force of nature right then.
She LIVES!
Badass pegasus is badass.
Can I get a salute for Spitfire? #MarsGotScrewed
And cue the entirety of Earth collectively shitting themselves. Like, so much shit there's a second moon below the planet/above Antarctica.
Meanwhile, Mindy is probably having her own personal Lesson Zero experience given what she just witnessed. Her and the entire NASA meteorological department.
Wow.
Dash will be seriously jealous of this sky-story!
For some reason, I find myself wondering if there’s an inexplicable bowl of petunias nearby...
(Uncertain if intentional, but the line brings the Magrathea sperm whale incident to mind.)
Edit: This works better than I thought it would.
Holy shit. Spitfire just won the most badass Martian award. No Time for Caution was playing in my head through this chapter. Truly awesome.
This is the first large-scale demonstration of real magic that cannot be explained away as technology. Oh gosh are the people on Earth going to have a wonderful time with this.
NASA is going to have some fantastic photographs from the satellites.
Spitfire can hardly think herself washed up after that feat though. She just punched Mars in the face and lived.
FLYYYY INTO THE DANGER ZONE!🎸
Welp, she finally did something more awesome then anything Rainbow Dash has ever done. :)
9153168
if by any means they doubted magic before they have no reason to now!
"So very very tired" reminds me of the ending of the "Home" song.
Truly an epic chapter.
Oh buck yes! Spitfire singlehandedly broke a hurricane on freaking Mars! And snow falls from the fire, because Mars is crying.
#MarsGotScrewed
#WhatDoWeSayToMars
#NotToday
alright now i'm wondering what this did to the Rover or to the other parts of Mars, because the way you said a couple of sentences is just sending up warning bells and red flags all over my mind
and
That just makes me extremely worried that this has set off a new butterfly effect that will screw them over in the next few Sols
Oh hey. Sucker punches for Mars.
Of course, this means that they're gonna have to grit their teeth and pray when the literal ball of hate finishes it's next wind up. I'm expecting a hell of a haymaker.
Spitfire may have damaged her lungs too much for active duty in doing this. But if she has ended her Wonderbolts career, she did it doing something at least as awesome as any pegasus in history, with a bang putting a rainboom to shame, not with a whimper as she feared. It's one thing to lose your career due to slow physical degradation from the environment, it's another to lose it heroically doing what needs to be done when nopony else can do it.
9153068 In my timeline notes, Sol 483 is "Operation Fireboom".
Fuck yeah! Spitfire fans on Earth (and on Equus) with be strutting around like roosters. Reactions to this should be beautiful. Such a large display of magic will raise eyebrows for the possibilities it opens about weather manipulation.
So is the snow actual snow or just carbon dioxide?
Wonder if this shall be the catalyst for atmospheric reconstruction, while the crystals do the terraforming, heh.
9153195 The first part was a lead-up to Spitfire's decision not to drop the mana batteries. It's always a bad idea to drop things from a height anywhere even remotely close to anything you want kept intact.
9153206 The snow is condensation from Spitfire's suit breach.
Was that the field projector breaking back there?
9153211
Ah, I c
Back on Earth, there's probably gonna be talk of classifying Spitfire as a WMD.
9153165
9153168
I am sad about the lack of Rainboom, such an event would be the kinda thing that would have spread like wildfire across the globe, the kinda thing that would hold the world in stunned silence for a day.
This corkscrew of flames is still amazing, very thematic and beyond the realm of Science to explain, but it won't be something that NASA can show to the public and go, "Look at this. Seriously, would you look at how awesome this thing we saw was." Flame Whirls exist on Earth, and thats if it was even a big enough flame corkscrew to appear on the photos from the Satellites.
After all, Contrails didn't appear on Satellite photos of Earth until we got the Tera Satellite mission up their with its camera designed to take high res photos of clouds. Its questionable if the Mars Satellites will be high enough resolution.
((Also it means at no point does the Maretian Universe get, "Rainboom: It means 'F#$@ you Mars', in Pony" and other such memes the internet would do with a orbital shot of a Sonic Rainboom.))
But even if the general public aren't impressed by a storm unwinding, the Meteorological community is literally going to freak the f$#@ out.
I just hope her lungs are not damaged beyond repair.
her voice raspy, most likely from the dust inhaled, I am worried what that'll do to her lungs and breathing in the long run.
9153229 When showing a few billion people the satellite feed showing a scale for the storm in hundreds of kilometers, and then printing those three wonderful words over the display Spitfire put on: show real-time.
People might not understand quite how amazing this flight was, or how awesome a feat Spitfire performed, but seeing a MASSIVE storm smashed apart in minutes will resound in the minds of people. No matter where you live on Earth, nature finds a way to throw some kind of messed up storm (of one kind or another) at you. Everyone knows a big blow when they see it. This is magic of such a fundamental nature that I think anyone on Earth would understand it.
9153197
Dash may have done a sonic rainboom, but she's never busted a hurricane solo
Well damn, if they weren't already eager for magic the demonstration of just what Pegasi can do will be a big deal on Earth. Much like Cherry and her trees are likely to be for anyone in Mark's field.
Go Spitfire GO!
9153223
A Weapon of Meteorological Dissipation?
Top 10 ways to get me hyped for Sol 551.
Mars knew what a unicorn and earth pony could do... it knew what the others could do.... it had seen a lot... it thought it had accounted for everything. The pegasus...? What good are those wings of hers if she can't fly? It was all too perfect.
Then the pegasus showed Mars what she was capable of.
YEAH! SHE DID IT! TAKE THAT, MARS!
Ahem.
Oh, you had me past the edge of my seat to the point of pacing, Kris. Let it never be said that you don't know how to give a payoff.
All this kinetic energy is going where? Shouldn't she be gaining momentum at this point?
9153253
That's half of it. She did it, with rocks strapped to her, and a spacesuit on.
Still, I am sure dash is convincing her friends right now to create her a storm just so that she can bust it solo.
and to Mars
9153291
Forward momentum.
Downward momentum, on the other hand, would be getting a stranglehold on her trajectory.
Mars right now:
1.bp.blogspot.com/-8a4yveGrDhA/VeOGnpIKzvI/AAAAAAAADpo/c-uzTgb9AOc/s1600/giphy.gif
"I'll get you all next time! Next time!!"
That better have been captured from the satellites, they're going to excrete bricks!
She did it. There's no telling what kind of damage this has done to her long term, but she did it. Friend of mine and I had discussed this forcefield tactic last night after reading this. Imagine my shock when I see that's what actually happened.
She's a hero, she pretty much just saved all the lives of her crew. I can't help wondering if she's going to be dealing with depression going forward though. Her days as a Wonderbolt were already in question before this. After what she has put herself through that might have sealed the deal that they are over. If she gets back home she'll be treated as a hero, but knowing that she can't return to her old life and what she had passion for has to make it bittersweet.
9153237
I want to make it clear before I continue. I am not saying this won't amaze many people. It will. But it won't have the same impact that a Rainboom would have had, for the simple fact that most people won't appreciate how incredible this feat is, and its much easier to come up with a reason to dismiss it.
For example:
1)We know the US government tried to use Weather as a weapon in Vietnam, and while its success is questionable at best, we have been fiddling with messing with the weather for over 50 years. Given the advances in basically every other technology over that period of time, its not hard for the conspiracy crowd to rain on this parade with, "They have been able to do this forever, this is just the first time we have seen it."
A rainboom, not so much.
2) The air on Mars is different, as is the Gravity, and while it would be OVERLY SIMPLISTIC to say the following statement, explaining why its wrong is far harder. "Big planets with lots of atmosphere have bigger and longer storms, while small planets with less Atmosphere have smaller storms. Look at Jupiter and Neptune with their decades long storms. What was done on Mars just then couldn't be done on Earth."
A rainboom, is a far more mystical event that no one can pretend science can explain away.
3) This one is more based on hersay then study, but I have seen enough evidence I am fairly convinced its true. Single images tend to catch the public eye more. We get more meme pictures then meme videos and they tend to last longer, historic events, even after the era of video are often referenced with a single image then a video, news outlets will favor single shots of war zones and the wounded when they are after emotional impact. Even 9/11, an event which was captured by more video cameras then any other event in history, is usually revisited by single static pictures of the burning towers.
In this same trend, NASA itself tends to favor releasing single shots to the public rather then video. Its not that they don't release video footage, but they STRONGLY favor pictures. And IMO this isn't just a data thing. To me this has more impact then this.
The unwinding of the storm won't look good in 1 picture....a Rainboom can definitely be shown in 1 picture though.
After all, lets be clear here...we aren't going to see the fire Contrail (as you need very high res camera to see contrails from space) due to the storm they won't even see Spitfire. They will just see a storm unwind itself and dissipate. And that leads to
4) "No....that can't be realtime. There is no way. Seriously, you expect us to believe that something invisible to the Satellites destroyed that storm. No way. Its went full Tornado right? It just burnt itself out. Most Tornados 20 minutes tops. Give me a quick google." *goes to phone* "The current longest lasting Tornado on earth in history is 2.5 hours. And the longest Tornado producing Supercell lasted 17.5 hours. This isn't real. The storm just burnt itself out."
Given that to even explain what Spitfire did they have to somehow explain a 10 hour Tornado....which is basically impossible in and of itself....NASA may just go, "Yeah, nope lets keep these photos under wraps for now. Not worth the risks of people calling bullshit."
Excellent. :D
9153367 I think we will have to agree to disagree.
9153308
Agreed. Rainbow Dash will either take this as a challenge OR
Well they have to celebrate Spitfire's return to the Wonderbolts somehow...or her retirement if she can't recover from Mars....
I can see the Wonderbolts trying to replicate her feat just to show others how incredible she is. Possibly even intentionally failing it (although getting Dash to do this will be really hard.) to give Spitfire a record, a Legend that will be hers forever, even if she is no longer a Wonderbolt.
Yarrr! Ha ah! Yes! That's the way to do it!
Lets see anyone top that! It'll never happen! Never in a million Sols!
YYEEEEAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!