Begin preparations, but wait for safety confirmation 45%
“There’s no question in my mind.” Fluttershy finished. She sounded reluctant, as she had with every word during the presentation. “There is nothing in that land that looks dangerous to Equestrian life. There are no known poisons in the air, or water, or soil. The air has the right concentration of inert gasses and oxygen. And if you wanted anything else, look at the plants.” She flashed through a few more slides, showing the growth around the palace taken from several angles. The trees and grass might be a pleasant purple, but they were otherwise quite similar. There were flowers, apparently insects and small animals too.
Maybe that’s why you want to go down there so badly. Do a little taxonomy of some alien life. Catch yourself a cute pet? But if that was true, Twilight wouldn’t complain. Her chief medical officer had also been the pony more reluctant about her presence here, without any stated reasons beyond her friends. If this was what it took to get her passionate about their mission, that was fine with her.
“So that’s it,” Applejack said. “Somehow this planet looks like it’s been through a war, worse than anything that ever happened on Equestria or off it. Buildings so advanced we can’t even imagine how to build ‘em are destroyed, that kinda thing. But there’s this one little patch that nobody bombs. Frankly cap, if this ain’t a trap I don’t know what is. Looks like they were doin’ their best to make a place look like a patch of home, then… bait us down there. That stupid machine won’t shut up about how we’re supposed to go down.”
“To somewhere else,” Spike pointed out. “I spent an hour talking it through its coordinates with a map. It used the same system as our computer when we’re indexing a planet, and it didn’t send us to that place.”
“What about the rest of the planet?” Twilight asked, levitating over a few of the pictures and studying them for any hints. But she could see nothing—they just looked like flowers and plants to her. “Could this part be protected, somehow? Maybe there’s poison all around it.”
“That’s possible.” Fluttershy admitted. “That’s why I gave you that spot. It’s… right by the edge. I took the probe out, looked around. Not much is alive in those buildings, but I think that’s more about availability. They’re… dry. No moisture, maybe not in the whole atmosphere.”
“Which… tells us a few things,” Applejack continued. “Like, we ain’t gonna refuel from down there. Also, if we do go, we gotta bring our own water. Bit of a pain if we wanna raise up a big crop. Maybe that little patch has its own reservoir.”
Fluttershy cleared her throat. “I don’t know… about any of that. All I know is, the probe didn’t find anything different when it drove away. Doesn’t mean the whole planet is safe. I just know you aren’t going to die from breathing, and you could probably grow something in the ground. We’ll… have to run more tests on the microbiome for that, and the microscopes are too big for a probe.”
It was safe—as safe as they could guess at from orbit, anyway. We didn’t just find an alien race, we found aliens who live in conditions similar enough to us that we can walk on their planet. That was either a wonderful coincidence, or more reason to trust Cozy Glow. She wasn’t sure which one she liked more.
But before Twilight worked out what to do about their landing, if indeed they were going to make one, she wanted to take one last chance with Pinkie Pie.
Pinkie Pie’s mental and physical recovery: Critical Success!
Random Event: The Oppress of Peace
But she didn’t get the chance, because that was when an explosion shook the deck beneath her.
“Radiation alert. Danger! Critical exposure in eight minutes, fourteen seconds. Radiation alert.” Twilight jerked upright, scattering the wreckage of their little meeting in a cloud of magic. From barely awake, her mind had snapped instantly to alertness.
“Where is it coming from?” she called to Applejack. The pony was already at the nearest wall-console, her hooves scrolling rapidly through ship’s sensors. “And… that’s dosage for a pony. Spike, aren’t dragons… resistant to radiation?”
He nodded. “More like Immune.” Indeed, Spike seemed more afraid by the sound than the thought of something on their ship irradiating them.
What exploded? The answer was obvious, and she wasn’t surprised to hear— “Hull breach in the emergency reactor. The fission reactor.” Applejack’s ears were flat against the blare of the siren as she leaned over the screen, reading fast.
“I’m going for Pinkie Pie!” Fluttershy asked. “Radio me with what we’re doing.”
Sleep caskets are shielded, our friends are safe. Twilight ran through the facts in her head. Spike is immune, we’re not. Two hazmat suits in the engine room. How much more time would that give us?
Applejack continued. “Damnit! Looks bad, Twilight. Someone knew what they were doing. According to this, the reactor has been running for eight months now. Never knew, cuz’… horsefeathers, doesn’t matter now! From the sound of those alarms, we haven’t been venting the waste like we’re supposed to. Seems like Cozy wanted to light us up like Hearthswarming.”
“How long to fix it?”
“Radiation alert. Danger! Critical exposure in seven minutes, thirty seconds!”
“Longer than that!” Applejack yelled, furious. “But… there are a few things we could…”
1. Evacuate the crew into the Prospector, leaving Spike behind to repair the Equinox. Spike might not have half of Applejack’s engineering talent, but he’s got immunity to ionizing radiation and that’s more important in the short term. We can stay in touch over the radio and exchange instructions, assuming that doesn’t blow up too.
2. Load the emergency archive of the computer into the Prospector along with the cryosleep caskets, then abandon the Equinox for good. [Nonzero chance of radiation poisoning, but unlikely to be fatal as Spike can do most of the heavy lifting] The Equinox is going to explode, run for your lives! Our chances of building a replacement on our own with just a Prospector aren’t great, but we can cross that bridge when we’re not dead!
3. Instead of risking death on an alien planet for her whole crew, Twilight could return everypony but Pinkie Pie (who hasn’t been awake long enough to heal) to cryosleep, leave Spike behind to repair the ship, and take the Prospector with just the two of them down to Proximus B. We could use our time productively in that healthy patch of land, or maybe explore the ruins, or even deliver the probe. But there’s no reason everypony else has to be in any more danger then they already are.
4. With her superior engineering talents and tremendous physical abilities, Applejack can travel down into the reactor and vent it in time to prevent a lasting impact and save the Equinox. The process will take longer than a lethal dose, but not so long that the effects overpower her earth pony endurance. [Fatal to Applejack] It’s the right thing to do, Twi. I always knew it might come to this.
(Certainty 215 required)
Somehow I get the feeling this is Starscribe kicking things into high gear because people have been constantly picking only the safe middle ground options and milling about with actual progress being slooow. >_>
Anyways ... I think evacuating everyone down to the planet is the best option.
Options 1 and 3 that leave Spike alone on a sabotaged ship (which may or may not explode from current damage, and may or may not have further sabotage done to it), which means any more accidents and he is done. He might be radiation-proof, but he sure as hell isn't damage proof, as him spending weeks in infirmary after getting blasted by Cozy's trap showed. If he stumbles into another trap, or if something simply explodes in his face while trying to fix the ship, both of which seem like real possibilities at this point, and there is no one around to help him and patch him up - RIP Spike.
Sacrificing AJ is also a no-go. Aside from the disaster this would have on morale, they can't afford to lose their best engineer. There is no point in saving the bloody ship if they don't have the expertise to repair it afterwards without Applejack, or save it from future breakdowns.
Thus: option 2. Evacuate down to the planet. Don't split the party, don't sacrifice anyone (except Cozy Glow - leave that thing behind! No, seriously.) - get everyone to safety (the cleared green area is the safest place that we have available right now), start growing food, release the rest of the crew and figure out things afterwards, when you aren't in danger of exploding or irradiating or whatever else might be waiting to go wrong on Equinox.
The loss of the ship is bad, but with the way things were going it's close to non-spaceworthy anyway, and a potential return trip in cryosleep caskets prone to giving their inhabitants braindamage was playing with Russian Roulette anyway. Whatever species inhabited the planet, it's obvious they were beyond spaceworthy, and the AI might yet help. We aren't exactly out of options for either finding a spaceship, building a new one or upgrading the lander with alien spacetech.
But first we have to survive to potentially do any of that, and sacrificing AJ (or picking options that sound like a damn-near suicide for Spike with a bajillion things that can go wrong) is surely not the way to do that.
Option one here seems to be the best for now. There is no way in hell we're going with number 4, same with number two. Both the Equinox and Applejack are irreplaceable. Option three is risky at best: Going to cryosleep on a ship with a faulty fission reactor doesn't seem to be the best of ideas.
Well option 4 is not happaning.
I say option 2 get everyone but Glow and the probe to the planet.
I know the odds are long but I think we can find a ship to repear among the ruind or on the orbital ring.
Going with #2 reason:
#1 If the equinox blows up Spike is dead.
#2 Safer option but we lose the Equinox.
#3 If the Equinox blows up Twillight, Pinky AND Spike are dead. (worse than 1 in all aspect)
#4 Do I even to to tell why?
And lastly, even if the Equinox survives, we'll still have a faulty fission reactor on board. It could also blow up anytime if the repairs aren't perfect.
Ugh. Well, in a crisis, sometimes you choose between the bad and the worse.
Sacrificing Applejack isn't the pony thing to do. Potentially sacrificing Spike (he's immune to radiation, but not sitting in the middle of a nuclear explosion) isn't either, but at least we've got a chance to keep everyone and everything in one piece. Given Pinkie Pie's experiences, returning ponies to cryosleep might basically be a one-way trip — and has all the problems of Option 1 on top of splitting the party and locking most of them away. And sacrificing the Equinox means going all in on being able to bootstrap from the planet — when we were just told we probably can't refuel
. (They mined a massive amount of ice from the asteroid, remember? Where are they going to get water if the whole planet is dry except for just enough to keep a square mile of ecosystem running?)Edit: Went back to Chapter 23. They were extracting argon from the ice to refuel, and argon should be in the atmosphere in abundance. So at least they should be able to jerry-rig something for refueling. But the bootstrap problem remains: they would then have no choice but to rebuild an interstellar-capable ship from scratch. Any of the other plans might end up at that state if things go wrong, but this one guarantees it. This is close enough to the worst-case scenario that it would be horrible to choose it deliberately.
Look at it this way: If you think they should be trying to give up and rebuild the Equinox, then evacuate everypony to the Prospector and try to fix it first. The ponies' Plan B becomes what you were angling for, and Plan A (saving the ship) is strictly better.
What the shit. Definitely not sacrificing AJ. Her life is worth more than the ship. I say option 1. Evacuate, but have Spike fix the ship with AJ instructing him
Obviously we're not sacrificing Applejack, I would be confused as all get-out if THAT one won the vote. Man, talk about no good choices. I don't like it, but I picked leaving Spike to repair the Equinox while everyone else bails. Abandoning the whole ship basically ensures they never go home, and who knows if they could even survive down there? Putting everyone else to sleep has a similar problem, it took HOW long to make enough Geneseed to wake them the first time? Just gonna have to hold our breath and trust Spike with this one, I think.
Glad to see Pinkie Pie has recovered, though! Hopefully we'll learn something about her situation soon!
i had to look at the comments forst before voting.
id hate to sacrifice Applejack so #4 is out. i donr like the idea of going back to cryosleep, so #3 is out. looks like 1
#1 or 2
Hmm this choice are quite lame... It's unclear what would be vented, it makes no sense that ONLY Applejack can do that. Also it's impossible that the habitat of the Equinox is not radiation shielded. They would be dead with MONTHS of cruising in the local system. And nuclear reactor don't really irradiate so far. The usual and sensible design for a nuclear powered spacecraft puts the nuclear parts well away from the living quarters with a TON of shielding in the middle. We are nearing "The Cold Equations" level of engineering failure... It could melt down quite easily yes and fundamentally scrap everything and render the craft completely unusable. But irradiating the ponies? Not really. They would already be irradiated to death.
I understand the use of the random generator, but the request are a bit specific in how much sh*t gets to the ponies and the engineering behind the various part of the ship is not even negligent but crosses over to the criminally malicious.
I felt compelled to remove the thumb-up...
A couple things i want to mention. Firstly, how do you not realise, for 8 months, that a fission reactor is running. We all know they were keeping a close eye on the fusion reactor, a lot of earlier decisions were based around refueling it, so obviously it's running, which means they've been generating an extra fission reactors worth of electricity.
The only way I can think of is that Cozy, somehow, someway, despite not being an engineer, managed to start up a fission reactor, disconnect everything connecting it to any gauges so there was no obvious way to know it was running, send all of that electricity to somewhere where it wouldn't fry anything from overloading, and then leave it in a stable enough position to run without supervision for 8 months. (Unless she meant it to blow up to kill everyone, but completely by chance set it in a very stable configuration)
Secondly, how did the computer calculate how long it would take for all of them to die? After receiving data about how much radiation was being released, it need to:
1) Calculate the lethal dose (Not very hard, just dividing two numbers)
2) Calculate how much radiation is actually reaching the crew. Just has to figure out how much metal is in the way, how the radiation would be reduced by it, any other things that may block it (clothing, water in pipes, whatever), and a whole multitude of other things.
All with less processing power than a pocket calculator. I'm not even sure modern computers could do it down to the precision of a second in a reasonable time frame, and this thing calculated it in one or two seconds.
Also something that just occurred to me now (an hour after writing this originally), going into cryo wouldn't save the ponies from radiation, they would still get a lethal dose, it's just that they would be frozen while receiving that dose. So when they get thawed out they'll just keel over from radiation poisoning immediately.
fun fact, you would receive a lethal dose of radiation from the radioactive atoms within your own body after about 10,000 years. And since your'e frozen, your body can't repair the damage done to it (and any nanobots you may have would be frozen with you, so they can't help.) This means even if you have perfect cryo technology, you would need to wake up every few hundred (maybe a thousand) years to repair the damage done from radiation.
Oh my god every option is bad.
4 means Applejack dies
2 means we lose the Equinox forever
1 and 3 are similar, both potentially suicidal for everyone who stays in the Equinox. 3 is just a worse version of 1. And even then, we are risking Spike's life.
It's definitely a no-win situation. We either lose applejack for sure, lose the Equinox for sure, or risk both the Equinox and Spike.
The Equinox without Applejack isn't actually an option, if you think about it. We'd be only delaying a catastrophic failure that she could prevent.
So the decision is either
2-Low risk, Low reward. Our capacity to go back home becomes basically zero, and we lose both Rarity and Rainbow Dash forever
1-High risk, high reward. If there aren't any more problems hiding (not very likely) and Spike can repair the ship (also not very likely), we don't lose anything. If any of those things happens, we lose three crew members and our ticket home.
Should we trust in a coin toss?
I vote 1. Spike may be valuable, but the possibility of saving everything is worth the risk.
As of me casting my vote, three people had voted to kill Applejack.
E: also, I thought abandoning ship didn't mean leaving anyone behind? Because if it does, I'm changing my vote. I figured we should abandon ship because it's increasingly clear we can't trust the ship...
9346404
Some of that makes sense, some of it does not. On the radiation shielding, there was just an explosion after the reactor had been operating for months undetected, Seems most likely the reactor is shielded but the explosion ruptured the containment unit for it. As to overall radiation shielding for cosmic radiation, that would just need to be on the outer hull, so a source inside wouldn't be attenuated.
I'm at a total loss for just what venting is needed, given one of the main pros to a nuclear reactor is there is no waste generated that would need venting like that. All you have is the fuel, which stays put until it's used up then needs to be replaced. Coolant might need it, but what the hell coolant are they using that absorbs that much radiation? Hell the ideal coolant is one that is also a neutron reflector, if it's something that absorbs neutrons (The way something becomes radioactive in the first place from exposure to a radiation flux) that is just horrible design as your coolant would actively be reducing your operational capacity and pushing down reactor power. So what waste is there that needs venting?
And how could a nuclear reactor be running for eight months without any sort of monitoring, adjusting, or power going anywhere? The whole way nuclear reactors generate energy is by generating heat, which is then transferred into something else, there needs to be something removing that heat. Which in turn will effect the reactor power depending on what the alpha t is for it. If the coolant has a positive temperature coefficient of reactivity, that could lead to this sort of bad scenario, cause that means the hotter the coolant gets, the further up it pushes reactor power. And yes that's just as stupid as it sounds and why pretty much all reactors are engineered with a negative alpha t, meaning that as coolant temperature rises it pushes reactor power down. Even if they were running a positive alpha t, eight months? Not only that but it would end up slagging the rector pile before it blew anything up. And that is only if, as it seems, ponies have never heard of a SCRAM system that should have cut off the reactor long before it got to that point.
Nuclear reactors are extremely secure unless engineered by idiots (Such as the SL-1 reactor aka the one and only time we let the army try to run a reactor rather then the Navy). Or run by idiots who bypass ALL the safety protocols in just the right way to fuck everyone, which was the case of Chernobyl, Three Mile Island. The only way you could get any kind of this level catastrophic scenario from one is if you drove it to go prompt critical, and that is not the type of event you can engineer long term, it needs to be a reaction to a very sudden change in conditions. All three of the above issues were cases where a reactor went prompt critical, (Well Three Mile Island was never confirmed to have done so, but conditions were there for it to have happened.) One done by a sudden introduction of a neutron reflective material into the core while it was already highly super critical and operating above normal tolerances, the SL-1 due to the idiot running it yanking the control rod all the way out of the core. Both causing massive surges in the average neutron flux inside the core that pushed reactivity to the point of prompt criticality. (And in the SL-1 case, blowing the control rod all the way out of its mounting and into the ceiling of the room above it, taking the operator who screwed up along for the ride.)
So yeah, how badly did they build their reactor that this could happen in the first place?
9346346
See the above diatribe for how that can't happen in part. No matter how badly they screwed up making their reactor, the basic physics of how a nuclear explosion works precludes a nuclear reactor from ever actually causing one. Every major explosion related to a reactor, yes including Chernobyl, has been a steam explosion.
Yes, point remain he's not boom proof, but that whole "Nuclear Reactor =Nuclear Bomb" idea needs to be killed.
And yes I am a nuclear engineer, why do you ask? Well, was when I was in the Navy anyway.
9346470
That reactor is something that is supposed to run YEARS by itself as it's what powers the engine of the ship... And it's an asinine design to put a big ball of deadly radioactive material INSIDE the shielding of the ship. There is ABSOLUTELY no need to put it inside the ship. NO design of an interstellar ship places the reactor INSIDE the living quarters.
9346470
I'm glad someone else typed this all out. Although, as a rebuttal:
Magic nuclear reactor.
so long as they are taking the other cryocaskets with them to the planet, then leaving spike up there would be the best solution. A ship is a huge place to check for sabotage, even worse with only 2 engineers. I say Cozy's casket should be left behind though.
Hooray!
H-hooray?
Oh. Not hooray. Very much not hooray.
Putting aside the logistics of a nuclear reactor operating unseen and Cozy Glow apparently performing console rerouting that would make Starfleet blush, we need to get the most reward for the least risk. A guaranteed loss of ship or ship-essential crew is unacceptable when other options are on the table, and given the necessary rush, I'm filing cryosleep as a form of losing crew. As such, the optimal choice is to send in the crew member with radiation immunity and several decades of experience in keeping this rustbucket together. Especially if AJ can advise him over the radio.
Sorry, but a DM has to know the rules of their own game/world, and I think you dropped the ball this time. I'd suggest a second try at the chapter that gets where you want to go, but still makes sense. As others have said, a reactor behaving like this doesn't pass the laugh test, but you can still get to where you ou need to be.
Say the sun lobs a really huge solar flare their way: without a sun monitoring satellite like earth has the blast would appear without warning, invisible up till now against the star. Say the planet has a slightly different atmosphere that extends its fringes further out like Mars does, coupled with van-allen radiation belts that make close orbit a radiation hazard during a flair. In effect, the crew is suddenly facing massive radiation, but the usual solution of low orbit inside the safety of the world's magnetic field would cause the ship to de-orbit in X hours due to air drag even with the engines going wide open. Safety from radiation could be found planetside, or in the world's shadow, but nowhere else until the flair ends. Because you can't see it from the side, you can't tell how long the flair will last - all the drama but actually possible.
I thing you meant "Equinox " here.
9346733
You're correct, fixed.
The dice give, and the dice take away.
1, put that dragon physiology to good use.
Okay, maybe this is the author trying to tell us something or maybe it's just my intense hatred of Pinkie Pie talking for me, but the fact the reactor just so happens to fail right around and/or after Pinkie recovers hardly seems like a mere coincidence.
For one thing, even though that so far the Equinox has been shown to be a really haphazardly put together vessel, the reactor shouldn't have just failed so easily, at least not on it's own anyways. There would have been multiple fail-safes that would have to have failed or, more likely, been bypassed in order for the reactor to suffer such a critical failure. Sure, Applejack mentioned that Cozy Glow might of been the culprit, but it's not like they can really prove that at the moment, even then considering how it was a good while before they discovered they had a stowaway, the time that she was in the prospector and the fact they had a close eye on her in-between capturing her and putting her back in the freezer, doesn't really leave much time for when she could of did it when they knew about her, which brings up another thing. Why would she have sabotaged the reactor when the crew were still in the dark about her being there? If anything that would have most likely increased her chances of being caught, now whether or not she or her anti-xeno cult would have wanted her to be found out is a debate for another day, point being that it would have been potentially hazardous to her mission to just sabotage the reactor when she was still unknown to the crew, even if she managed to find a way to make sure the alerts didn't go off.
The fact that they didn't notice that the reactor wasn't venting waste properly probably means that either;
Sure her mental and physical recovery was critical success, but that doesn't mean it's a success that benefits the rest of the crew. Plus Pinkie Pie being well, Pinkie Pie, what exactly "mental recovery" means for her could be anything and we still don't exactly know what in Tartarus has been going on inside her head or whether the "voices in the darkness" she mentioned accouple chapters back are actually real or if they're some kind of delusion of hers. Considering how Pinkie is capable of doing some really unexplainable things and the fact that she should at least be somewhat familiar with the ship, even if only a little, and that at least she believes there may be some sort of force out to harm all of them (which, again, is purely speculative at this point since there's very little evidence to verify that) combined with the fact that she has potentially suffered serious brain damage (also there's no guaranteeing that Pinkie will still be in the medbay when Flutters goes to get her) and with some of the points mentioned above does seem to leave room for the possibility that Pinkie Pie could have caused some serious damage to the ship.
Though, as I have admitted, I am pretty biased against Pinkie so I could be completely wrong on all of this.
So.... as for the voting...
Now option 2 is obviously more trouble then it's worth so that's a no go. 3 is basically taking a huge risk and if something happens down on the surface or if the cryosystems for Fluttershy and Applejack fail then they're in serious trouble (plus I seriously don't trust Pinkie right now if my rant above is any indication.) That just leaves option 1 and 4, through admittedly I decided to go with the majority for this with option 1 since it's the least risky of the four, though option 4 was a serious consideration of mine, but I can see why people aren't voting for it since it's blatantly sending AJ to her doom (though that didn't stop Spock in Star Trek: The Wrath of Kahn, but I digress) and frankly, she's still a pretty valuable asset to the team, even if she keeps having doubts about the signalers, we can't really afford losing her, Spike can't be everywhere at the same time you know.
(Wow, first time I bother actually leaving a comment after about 35 chapters of just voting without commenting and I use it to mostly just bash Pinkie Pie, sorry about that. Though I'll try to leave a comment on here when I can going further... hopefully. )
9346530
No, this wasn't the main reactor that is meant to do that, they explicitly said this was the backup reactor. So not necessarily meant to run for years. Secondary to that... so the design of every single nuclear powered vessel ever made is asinine? Why would you put the reactor, the source of power for everything on the ship, outside your shielding? You'd want to keep that as far into the center of the ship as possible to prevent damage as much as possible from hostiles or environmental issues. The issue here has nothing to do with the reactor being where it is, as again, explosion clearly ruptured whatever shielding was keeping all this radiation clear for the last few months of it running. It's that it seems to somehow generate so much extremely reactive waste that needed to be vented regularly and being able to operate in a stable state of criticality unsupervised for months that makes no sense.
9346548
Which might apply if they'd mentioned anything magic related about it, but all we've heard is nuclear fission and radioactive waste. (Which again, no reactor not explicitly made by an utter sadist who wanted things to fail as horribly as possible would be generating in the amounts and reactivity that would cause a crisis like this.) Yes an operating reactor will generate a good amount of RAM, but the vast, vast, vast majority of stuff treated as RAM is done so just because it has the potential to have at some point have been exposed to a nuclear flux that may have potentially caused it to either become radioactively active itself, or pick up some debris of some kind that is active. Even the stuff that is radioactive is so faintly active it's not really a threat other then for extremely long term exposure issues. Hell, Rickover drank a glass of primary coolant in front of Congress to prove just how safe it was while trying to get them to fund building more nuclear ships. If anything the chemicals added to the coolant to control it's pH would be a bigger threat then any radioactivity from it.
9346799
As to your point 1, different reactor. The main reactor they've been working on and talking about so far has been some kind of fusion reactor. This is a heretofore never mentioned backup fission reactor that went boom.
Eh, even if there might be some plausible reason for this level of redundant incompetency it still is REALLY bummer to read here and now.
*Sees Option 4*
Last I checked this was NOT Star Trek, and the next chapter is NOT 'Search for Spock'.
Plus the morale hit would be too high to justify this
Edit: 5 people voted to kill off Applejack... you monsters
Well... That just happened.
Now's not the time for heroics, AJ. Similarly, now's not the time to abandon the Equinox, and a significant chance of mission success along with it. I don't care how good a doctor Fluttershy is; a nonzero chance of radiation exposure (spelled, "permanent, irreversible consequences") is not worth the risk. No 4 and no 2. And remember how long it took to get two more members out of cryo? Yeah... 3 would undo all of that.
But I'm not just choosing 1 because of process of elimination, either. 1 is like 3 but better, because twice as many ponies will be awake, one being able to fix the ship (by means of verbal instruction) and one being able to fix crew members, most notably Pinkie.
For me, it's not even close. 1 all the way.
Abandon ship! GET TO DA PLANAT!
Okay, it might not be the best option, but I think it would lead to the more interesting story.
9346799
Check out the Discord server. There's a channel in there showing all the rolls Starscribe is making for the story.
DO NOT SPLIT THE PARTY.
I vote we all abandon ship. We can’t afford to lose anyone, and something is waiting for us on the surface of the planet anyways, and I bet there’s even better ships in that ring. Grab everyone and make a break for it!
Just to confirm: If we choose Option 1, are we going down to the planet immediately, or are we going to have the Prospector hang around close to the Equinox in case Spike fixes it soon (but not too close in case of explosion)?
Absolutely not, Apple Horse! Spike is competent, he can fix it. Take everyone to the surface meanwhile. I vote 1.
9346915
Not every CURRENT vessel. Those have needs to keep everything contained because they have water around. I specifically said INTERSTELLAR ship. On a thing that goes out of the atmosphere you don't keep the big ball of deadly thing next to your people as you can easily avoid it... Missed the backup thing, at that point I would question also the rationale of using a backup FISSION reactor as it is hideously heavy, for something that in the end does not give that much usefulness... What I mean if the design concern are so paranoid about redundancy and safety to put a WHOLE fission reactor on the ship as a backup that EVERYTHING else is so slapdashed and on a ultra limited resource is kinda strange... It's evident that part of the ship pops up seemingly at random to get around as plot devices, and the fabled durability of this thing is really really low in reality.
9346799
H-Hey!! Someone else made the Spock connection!
9346423
My question exactly, how do you not know a fission reactor, or any major ship's component, is up and running? AJ dropped the ball on this one, once she realized, because of Cozy Glow, and because of Pinkie having been awake when she wasn't supposed to have been, that things hadn't gone according to plan, she should have taken Spike and done a hooves on, front to back, eyeball inspection of every system in the ship. And even if the fission reactor was supposed to be in low output idle mode for most of the trip she should have still physically looked to make sure it hadn't sped up. Shenanigans are always your first warning to check everything, now, if possible.
At the moment option 1 seems the best of a bad situation, and as Spike gets things tamped down brief returns, for supplies, and then assisting in clean up, briefly at first, then longer and longer as the radiation dies down are possible, and if the Equinox becomes hopeless, pick up Spike and go planet-ward then if you must.
The wild card is what, if anything, the AI Spike built can say or do. Only thing that's certain about that, it hasn't been active for 8 months to have caused this in the first place. But, what if it's taken over the computer on the ship and is making it look like the fission reactor is bad when it's not? Could the explosion have been faked somehow, and now it's sending false reports to the crew to try and motivate them to get a move on to the planet's surface? And if they go, will they take the probe with them?
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I get the feeling that the architects of the Equinox were just a smidge too excited that they finally got a call on the SETI phone, and were trying to respond too soon. The Equinox represents the
not quite ripefruit of their labor. (Apple pun not intended.)9347641
More likely we are seeing the effects of a competent saboteur that has had at least a year to muck stuff up.
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The issue is that there are too many fault for it to get where it is...
From the little we glimpsed they had a spacefaring civilization already at the time of Nightmare Moon return with space battles...
That means a mature space environment. You don’t kludge things.
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Likewise! I also was reminded of the ST:TNG episode where Deanna was trying to get a promotion and she kept failing the simulation. The reason was the solution to the problem was that in order to save the ship, she had to order Geordi to sacrifice himself to fix the problem.
#2
We can cross that bridge when we are not dead.
Wiser words have never been spoken and this is the option that keeps everyone safely alive and not dead. (even if slightly up shit creek with a shortness of paddles)
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Still haven't addressed why placing one of the power sources for your ship on the outer edges where it is MORE likely to be damaged is anything but utterly idiotic.
I'm not disagreeing that this 'event' overall feels far too random, forced, and makes too little sense to take at all seriously and not fully shatter my suspension of disbelief. But the part of it you seem to fixate on does make sense. Why not a nuclear reactor? Fissile material is, pound for pound, the most energy dense material we have access to, to the point comparing it to any other source such as coal or oil requires a log scale to be even remotely readable.
You seem to be under the impression that nuclear reactors are some ticking time bomb of instant death, they are not, no reactor not built by idiots should ever be putting a ship in the condition this one is. It's the fact the reactor could do something like this in the first place that makes no sense, not them having one. Every major incident caused by a nuclear reactor has been 100% the result of not only operator error, but the operators going out of their way to fuck things up.
While yes Cozy was trying to fuck things up, it's the way this seems to have gone bad that still makes no sense, and how the reactor was able to operate for eight months without them noticing at all until suddenly doing this. The shear level of safegaurds and fail safes that would need to either be missing or able to be bypassed is staggering, not to mention a reactor can't operate without some sort of heat sink, which means somewhere for the power it's generating to go. I can see no even remotely plausible way for something like this to actually happen with a nuclear reactor that wasn't built to fail from the start.
As to reactors on ships, do note, in the entire history of the nuclear navy, not one single fatality has been caused by the operation of the reactor. ( A few due to incidents involving the secondary steam systems, but those you'd have on any type of power, not just nuclear.) The only fatality in the US Armed Forces caused directly by the operation of a nuclear reactor was the aforementioned SL-1. The one and only time we let the army try having one.
So no, there is no issue at all with having a nuclear fission reactor on board as a back up, or not having it hanging off the edge of the ship where it's just begging to be damaged. The issue is on having a reactor this badly built and out of nowhere, that defies all the operating principles of how a reactor works for the sake of random drama.
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Oh I know. Heck, I agree with you that it seems dumb. I was just presenting a potential counter argument. It's possible that the ponies' nuclear reactors use magic to (for example) boost efficiency, or even as an integral part of it's operation. Perhaps magic is how they deal with the "waste" heat since in space it's not like there's anywhere for heat to really go (especially in an emergency unit like that one), and that system failed, causing coolant to vaporize, explosive outgassing... Actually, venting for overheating reasons makes sense. But not for radioactive reasons. Eh, still a stretch.
Then again, magic ponies traveling through space on a rocket that uses electro-magical-mechanical computers with functional cryostasis and a "fabber" that'll build a functional landing craft? I think my suspension of disbelief will handle it haha.
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The issue is so far, it's actually been pretty hard and accurate on the science angle, barring those things explicitly mad possible through magic, such as usable cryo stasis, and the ability to maintain a fusion reactor. The computer is realistic and shockingly ancient compared to our tech, the way it treats injuries, space, gravity, atmosphere, everything has been as realistic as possible, every issue, every problem has made sense based on how the physics of this stuff works. Then this happens out of nowhere and makes no sense based on how nuclear reactors work.
Hell what type of radiation are they even dealing with? Alpha and beta radiation would not be a threat at all given they'd never make it through a single bulkhead, gamma radiation would penetrate through a lot, but even then, just how much radiation is being put out that its that dangerous for the whole ship? Tenth thickness of steel for gamma radiation is four inches, meaning for every four inches of steel the radiation has to pass through, it's reduced to only 10% of its strength, so with the mount of bulkheads and metal between them and where this happens, how could it spread that badly through the whole ship like this?
Now if this is a neutron flux, yeah they are fucked, that stuff is insanely hard to attenuate and is by far the most damage form of radiation (Well technically alpha radiation does more biological damage to you, but only if it can actually reach your cells, and given it can't even penetrate skin only happens if you ingest it in some way. This is why radon is so hazardous, it's an alpha radiation emitting gas, so you can breath it in and the radiation gets to tear you up.) as well as the hardest to block. You either need a material that is a good neutron absorber, like hafnium, or a neutron reflector like water or a lot of hydrocarbons (Key is you want as many hydrogen atoms as possible between you and the source). And even then you'd need a lot of it to work.
But getting that large a neutron flux pretty much requires a highly reactive source that is actively critical. The reactor itself would be the only source of it, any waste would have to be so damn screwed up to be that dangerous. Not only that but if it is a neutron radiation surge, they are beyond fucked cause that is the stuff that causes other material to become radioactive themselves. Not to mention exposure to high intensity neutron radiation makes a lot of material become very brittle.
Let's hope the problem will solve itself once the residue is vented, else they're screwed royally. Specially if the crops die from it, they'd be forced to relocate to the planet for a LONG while. Wait, does the prospector have crop growing facilities? If so things get better. Anyway, #1 is the way to go. Abandoning any ship permanently is not feasible, and if he can at least vent the radiation so it becomes safe enough for Applejack to work then there won't be any problems.
#1
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Daleks do help life become what they "should". Sometimes. In S7, Episode 1 (2005-present reboot) "Dalek Asylum", Amy, Rory and the Doctor are kidnapped by Dalek puppets - that is humans that have been converted into Daleks, but not fully. This was employed on the Asylum planet to turn "any attacking force into planet security" and this includes dead organic matter, except, of course, Doctor Chinny. They're assisted through the Asylum by Oswin Oswald, aka Souffle Girl or Clara, who turns out to be a human literally converted into a Dalek via a plot contrivance because she's a genius.
There's also Season 3 Episodes 4 and 5 (Daleks in Manhattan, Evolution of the Daleks) where the Daleks kidnap humans during the Great Depression to make either pig slaves, or take the intelligent ones to make other Daleks. Dalek Sec ends up merging with a human, and ends up using the captured humans to make the new human Dalek hybrid instead. The rest of the Cult of Skaro disown Sec as a Dalek and continue the plan to make humans with Dalek DNA, but obviously the Doctor does some Doctoring and saves the day.
I'm both of these examples the Daleks converted humans, and attempted to, in a similar fashion as the Cybers would. That's the only reason I even touched the Dalek comparison.
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And in each case, those versions end up being seen as blasphemous abominations to other Daleks. It's why the rest of the Cult turned against Sek. Also the opening two parter of season nine raises the question of if Dalek Clara actually got turned into one or just shoved into one of the chassis given we see Clara Sue Prime fit inside of one and operate it.
While Daleks have, on rare occasions, been know to convert non-Daleks into Dalek's its always out of desperation on the Dalek's part and a need to create more troops quickly or with no other way of doing it. Not out of any desire to 'help' lesser beings attain the perfection that is being a Dalek.
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Firstly, I've only seen as far as "Snowmen" so cannot comment on further episodes.
And also the Daleks only ever see creations as blasphemous one time: S1 Ep 12 and 13 (Bad Wolf, The Parting of the Ways) where the Doctor remarks the Daleks don't have a concept of blasphemy, but they do when Dalek hybrids.
The examples I mentioned were also still valid. The human shells with the eye stalks was the thing I was talking about for Dalek Asylum, and Sec was NOT the example I was using. The example I was using was the humans the Cult of Skaro kidnapped for the express purpose of turning into more Daleks. It could also noted that they aren't mindless killers, even though it seems like it most of the time.
Daleks are shown to be smart and adaptable to a variety of situations with complex stratagems and tactical manoeuvres. It is unwise to assume anything with them, remember S5, Ep3 where the Daleks pose as a British war drone in order to "birth" pure Daleks?
My point is to never discount Daleks from any situation just because it seems out of character for them. They are not war drones, they are clever and witty and ready to work with other races in order to secure the Doctor in a large box with no escape.
Until there is because plot.
It’s like everybody forgot we have a time travelling space wizard on board.
Option x - Twi sends AJ or Spike back in time a week to fix the problem before it happens.
Option x + 1: You can believe Twilight or AJ can come up with a magical solution and I bet even among our fans here we can do it with trivial spells from the show.
Put your wizard hats on people. There is a better way.
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You know what, I say we arrange a meeting with Discord.
Sacrificing Applejack is out of the question. It wouldn't even be for the greater good since we'd lose our only engineer.
Putting everypony back to cyrosleep would be a serious setback, and besides, I'm not sure it would ensure their safety.
That leaves #1 and #2, and since I'd rather not abandon the ship, I'll go with #1.
I can only hope for the best result possible.
P.S. Hooray for Pinkie's recovery! I'd now like to see what this "critical success" entails.