This story is a sequel to A Clash of Magic and Steam
Survivors of a decade long war that ended two years ago, Wiggly Sprocket and Live Wire have fended for themselves after war claimed their parents.
While the United Pony Space Initiative proved victorious, the Lilian star system was left nearly in ashes. The warp nexus allowing access to the wider UPSI still sits as a ruined mess, leaving the small planetary colony and two stations to fend for themselves against resurgent piracy.
Wiggly Sprocket has dreamed of leaving the system since her parents were killed, and taking the first shuttle when the nexus is repaired. However, money is sparse and the breaker yards only pay enough to keep her and Live Wire afloat.
That is until happenstance sees a battered but functional ship fall into her hooves. Trading the safety of a steady job for the potential riches floating in the void, Wiggly and Wire never could have imagined what they would find in the midnight sea.
Reading the 1st book is not truly required, but it will give context you might otherwise miss.
And so a new story begins, I shall watch this with great interest
Ooooo new story, and its related to the last one in someway, looking forward to where you take this!
Oh my dear god its happening! i almost thought i will need to wait like months oh my im hyped!
From Steam engine to Space ships, love this.
ok i will be honest. i pretty like the story, the only things (exept brainstorming) i find intresting i actually didnt thinked there will be this huge timeskip. twelwe colonies arent growing on trees let alone interstellar travel. id say we skipped around 1000-1500 years at least. i didnt think the story will be bad or anything it will be glorious,but i still have multiple questions burning in me. Like this means Terra is not planetbound? it didnt regulate the souls and reborns on Equus but through the entire galaxy? or it expand itself as the ponies colonize other planets? I wonder how many things got frogotten since clash of magic and steam. because history can be easily altered and or deleted from this far away. i yearn to learn more about this alt universe after this huge leap in future :D
Alright! Another good start on what is likely going to be an incredible fiction.
I get the feeling that Wiggly is a reincarnated Twilight Sparkle?
Also, what is up with "the war"? Was this war with other ponies? gryphons? something else? What started the war?
Since this is a sequel, it was mentioned that ponies were likely drifting towards all becoming alicorns, with pegacorns eventually phasing out. So either that didn't happen, or its not that far into the future.
I hope the blogpost I made about how metal processing works helped, even if tangentially.
My apologies, I accidentally hit the publish button.
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So... this fanfiction is an accident? April 1st is several months away still.
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No, i was reviewing it on my phone and hit the unpublish button.
Very exciting first chapter, looking forward to more to come.
I'm getting strong Hardspace: Shipbreaker vibes from the opening. Also maybe a bit of Starsector in relation to the current situation. Eh we'll see where this goes.
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I don't think so based on the previous fanfiction and knowing how law abiding pony writes fiction. Starting off maybe, but his stuff is never one-dimensional like that. Shit, most of his stuff is breaking into 4th dimension level of mind-blowingly good.
Woah, new year with new chapter.
Bit of a nitpick here. The following line "Wire brought the freighter to a stop next to a hole that..." is not really accurate; things in space don't stop. I would change it to something like "Live Wire performed the final maneuver to drift alongside a hole in the cruiser that..."
Phrasing it that way would passively account for whatever spin or tumble the dead ship might have for the people reading that might have more active imaginations. If you want to add more detail to the scene, throw in a sentence about the vibrations occasionally felt of random debris hitting the hull of the dead ship.
Finally, what are the Centauri? Do I have to search a clash of magic and steel for the word to remind myself what they are?
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The centauri were the founding species of the emerald horde of the last book. They look like what their name implies.
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Centaurs?
Eeeeee loving the new story so much!!!
I loved reading this chapter. Great lore across the system and what is to come.
Dang! Love your work! This was another great chapter!
PS: Are you using the movie Titan A.E. as inspiration? I'm picking up similar vibes in the story.
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I haven’t seen that movie in forever. But no I’m not using it as inspiration.
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enh, sounds more like a mixture of cyberpunk and firefly than anything else.
A wonderful update!
Always love to see updates for this story.
I love the lore of the world you creating
Did not see Winter becoming part of the team so soon, but I am glad she is here. Lucky Wire. I think Sprocket will be just fine. I work maintenance so, I know first hand how you have to have really thick skin to work with maintenance workers.
Military, is probably ruffer, but not by much. 
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I think it was said in passing, but i do remember terra mentioning that it was a shard of something greater, responsible for keeping watch of all creatures in the world until they evolved to a certain extent. (Have not read this sequel yet, should probably get out of the comments before i get spoiled)
"Proportional"
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Military upbringing here, and work trades. The only ones worse than a soldier for having a dirty mind and a love of roasting each other is a navy sailor. Not even civvy sailors come close, from what my dad would tell me. Tradesmen are pretty bad for it, but not nearly as bad as what I've heard my dad describe while serving.
Cloud Jumper rest in peace, you where a damm fine ship.
Mah god its barely get flightworthy and already shredded to Pieces.. Poor cloud jumper
Surprised to see the ship meet such a fate so soon. Willing to bet that means they'll be stumbling across something better soon though. Looking forward to more.
So Aliens and they can use hyperspace ? By Terra Sake, Wiggly Sprocket’s will go bonkers with than all new crazy alien Tech.
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Or this will be a running gag where no matter how hard they try, they are left with a destroyed ship at the end of the mission/episode/chapter. Just to give the new ship the name of their old one and continue their journey.
But from what I see here, it will probably be a case of Ship of Theseus. They will take parts from their old ship and combine them with the new one. Until, after a few iterations, they end up with an unholy abomination of a spaceship that is also the most powerful ship in the system.
No good deed ever goes unpunished.
I wish we got to spend more time aboard Cloud Hopper, just a few more slice of life moments with Wiggly working on the ship, Live learning to fly her, Winter missing amenities only a cruiser could offer, etc. To give us a chance to be hit as hard by this loss as Wiggly will be.
) keep it all linear and open with what was going on aboard the Hopper at that time?
Maybe instead of the flashback to Thaddeus (which I actually managed to miss the 'earlier' part of initially and was wondering why it had taken several days to vacuum up the water
Sounds like minotaur, only with unicorn instead of bull.
Kind of surprised they didn't catch the escape pods ejecting on their sensors, or scan the surface afterwards for survivors. I assumed Winter would be expecting the slavers to immediately be coming after them, too.
Morales and Mote sound like fun, and great work on the exposition there, plus perfect explanation for how he's learned the language but hasn't made contact. "Bipedal Feline" had me thinking Abyssyian at first, but could we have our first species not from Equus? Surely some form of relative with that remark about the "Father Species" and all the pony-like features, hopefully we find out next time on Saaaaaalvage!
Couple typos:
Akira is rising !
Ah, so THAT is where Lyra went.
Since she couldn't get humans, she went for the next best thing. Aliens!
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But if its true, this also mean Terra isnt an Equus bound deity or, A will of a planet. Rather begin closer to at least a galaxywide deity or hivemind thing
I think the thing that confuses me the most about this fanfiction so far is why the other races of equus even have any kind of comparable-ish technology to begin with. The technology gap would considerably widen as time moves on. What is not exactly specified is how much longer its been since the death of Twilight Sparkle. Was this right after? Or maybe an incarnation later? regardless, they shouldn't really have space-fairing ships.
second thing I'm confused about, in this chapter:
I don't get it.
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Terra, as established by the recollection of Luna and Celestia, is at least pangalactig. It acknowledged the Green Mother and stated that there are multiple and that they are normally limiting the sapient species to one per planet. (Commenting, that it is unusual for them to let more then one such species exist)
Therefore the Green Mother(s) are at least planetary, without clearly establishing their upper bound. (While somewhat implying planet/solar system "bound")
With Terra managing the souls of all species of all Green Mothers, encumpassing all those planets. It is even unclear, if Terra is bound to an universe or dimension. We don't know, if it handles the souls of Lyra's human world f.e..
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As far as i understand it, with some conjections.
The Cathrax were a spacefaring civilisation "long" before the ponies, but with a similar approach towards non-spacefaring races they encounter.
So they visited Equiss in the past, but the ponies wern't spacefaring yet, so they left them alone, mostly. During that (or one of the following visits) they aquired themselves a terracorn, which they integrated into their Race as it's own Xenotype. Based on Morales reverence, it wasn't the alien-abduction type of acquiring.
Terracorns (earthpony/unicorn equivalent to pegacorn, if you havn't read the prequell) are known to ponies as a concept, but not as a viable ponytype. Their magic is gravity based, which causes them to die to their own magic, mostly prebirth and normally taking the mother with them.
We know of exactly one terracorn living into adulthood, Lyra Heartstring. And that is due the fact, that she wasn't born a terracorn. The pony Lyra died at birth and the one in the first book is the human Lyra. Since that Lyra was paralysed in the human world, she "chooses" to stay in Equestria and became a retainer for the Inquisition.
In her later days, she lived alone and one day vanished into the woods, not to be seen again.
*conjectur*
With the terracorns mastery over gravity and the Cathrax 's hyperstace travel being gravity based, it is reasonable to conclude, that the Cathrax visited Equiss around that time (a few decades after the return of the sisters) and that Lyra picked up their drive/they picked up her gravity manipulation and investigated. In the end, Lyra joined the Cathrax for one reason or another, explaining her vanishing without a trace, and became the progenitor of the Cathrax's terracorn xenotype. With that timetable, the ponies were ~300 years away from reaching space. Add a few more centuries to transition from that to now, and the Cathrax had more then half a century to integrate terracorns as a xenotype and their magic into their spaceships as Gravitors to improve their hyperspace drive.
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Going after them with what? A Spaceship is nice and dandy, IN SPACE. But entering a planetary gravity well on top of the drag of an atmosphere? That places severe restrictions on what can and can't land on the moon. As such, the escape pods mean nothing, as their passengers are now stranded on an inhospitable world without oxygen above their suits tanks.
Going after them would therefore be an extrem risk, at high cost with little reward, if any at all. Even should they survive the crash of their escape pods, the pirates would have to get to and catch them before their oxygen runs out.
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I didn't recall reading about lyra just going completely missing. Makes sense though. After several hundred years the bloodline would basically be a wash though without incest. Maybe they are good at bioengineering.
That still remains the question about the other races even being space faring at all. Realistically there should be a very large technology gap based on what was happening from the previous book.
"Figures between everything" sounds pretty awkward, maybe "translating between our units (of measurement)" instead. For the second I may be being extra pedantic, but "everything from temperature to pressure" doesn't sound like that broad a range at all when those two can be directly linked by the ideal gas law, nor are either going to get them to units for energy or power that quickly. I'd image mass and distance would be the easiest to demonstrate with cutting and scanning tools, and we can define the joule from work done with those two. Maybe from mass to temperature for a broader range if you want to keep to the spirit of Wiggly being proud of their ability.
Attagirl Wiggly! Do Jack Harkness proud!
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That's fair, yeah, but a lot of softer sci-fi has basically every craft capable of atmospheric flight whether it really makes sense or not. And if the Cloud Jumper's sensors were able to detect the oxygen pocket from orbit, it's plausible the corvette could have too. It'd only take an offhand comment to dispel the possibility of them still being chased.
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Thank you for the catches, but I treat medeca like doctor is. It is capitalized when used as part of a title, but it is not when not actively part of a person's title.
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Oh I was just trying to point out the first time it was Medica not Medeca, and didn't know which one was intended
Love the sibling dynamic between Wiggly and Wire. Always enjoy seeing updates for this fic. Also cool that Wiggly getting someone to geek out over or with or both.
Seems like he didn’t tell the full truth, it’ll be interesting to see what is coming.
Why do I get the feeling something like the zerg or similar was on-purpose-accidentally created to survive on the harshest of planets.