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Beavernator — It's Not Rocket Science
Published: 2015-01-09 16:25:59 +0000 UTC; Views: 31320; Favourites: 580; Downloads: 188
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...Therefore by using this simple formula I was able to guide my ship to the moon, retrieve Princess Luna, and send her back home with ample fuel for my ship.You were the one who escorted Nightmare Moon back here? That pony was filled with... highly non-friendship material!
Clearly you forgot one thing. WHAT?! A cup of coffee! Have you never met a coffee drinker in your life?
The night shift is never easy. IT DOESN'T HELP WHEN YOUR SISTER SWAPS YOUR ORIGINAL COFFEE FOR DECAF!
The brand was in cursive and I couldn't read a darn thing. Nonsense! You've read all those other cursive brand names well enough!
Cecci-bola that soft drink maker, Gisnep the chidren's entertainment company, Isarleie that brand of Terran model dolls, Tiallnnnark the card company...
Imagine how crazy it would be if we got all of those names wrong. Ridicuous! Cecci-bola sounds like the cure for ebola.
Don't say that here, Luna; you're gonna- AUGH! My eyes are bleeding! It's the ebolimana! Those are tears.
Oh... they are. Heh. I didn't say stop. But what am I...? The dresses you made for me were all delicious.
EDIT: No, I do not study mechanical engineering or post-secondary chemistry in any capacity. I was aware someone was bound to call me out on the technobabble not holding up.
Background by Ikillyou121 , Pinkie vector (Panel 3) by kyrospawn , I claim ownership of all other art assets.
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Comments: 128
At this Pinkie Pie can make an attack helicopter version of her Pink-a-copter by this point...
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It's not rocket science. It's Pinkie science!
I mean, Pinkie logic! Er, wait! Ah, I give up....
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But Pinkie! How do you power it at low altitudes?
I mean, I presume you configure the dragscoop to carry enough oxygen from the troposphere to keep you breathing for hours, easily enough to make it to the moon and back on a Bussard ramjet, but in that case it's not doing any work to propel you until you're most of the way to the thermosphere. Do you use the Faraneigh effect to induce divergence in the ambient magnetic field and then ride on the differential induction? I'd have to run the math to be sure, but that seems like it might be enough if you pedaled hard.
See, now I've totally nerd-sniped myself. I'm going to be wondering about the most efficient way to harvest usable energy from a magnetic field with nonzero divergence all day.
(By the way, the Faraneigh effect is a means to generate transient magnetic monopoles by the application of magical current, so Twilight's right.)
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Wait... does dragscoop mean anything other than that thing on cranes?
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So far as I know, it's just technobabble here. It just felt right to attribute the air supply to the dragscoop.
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Since when Pinkie Pie become a scientific genius?
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Someone who knows their science needs to dumb that down a level or two for the rest of us.
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It was technobabble, mainly. But there were some parts that almost made sense.
A ramjet is a type of engine that gathers some part of the reaction powering it by passively scooping it up and compressing it with a forward intake. What Pinkie is referring to when she says "deuterium-based ramjet" and then corrects it to being protium-based is what is known as a Bussard ramjet. This is a theoretical propulsion system for an interstellar spaceship that generates magnetic fields to act as a preposterously large scoop that gathers interstellar hydrogen (protium and deuterium being two isotopes of hydrogen) as it passes through space. That hydrogen is fused to act as the ship's fuel and power source. That way a spaceship can travel arbitrary distances without having to carry any fuel, which is a huge advantage since most of the weight of a rocket is its fuel and most of that fuel is only necessary because all that fuel has to be carried until it's burned. Unfortunately, current models say that interstellar hydrogen isn't dense enough for this to work in practice, but it's still a cool idea, and has long been popular in science fiction for giving a plausible way to get a ship up to relativistic speeds.
The magnetosphere is the area around a planet where the dominant magnetic field is the one generated by a planet. I honestly don't have any idea what magnetospheres have to do with anything, and in fact suspect that if you tried to operate a Bussard ramjet within a planet's magnetosphere, the planetary magnetic field would completely ruin the ability for the magnetic scoop to function.
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Would you theoretically be able to gather said hydrogen from, say, a star? Coast the corona of one and take the hydrogen that's released from the top layer, and then compress it? I may be mistaken, but I believe that was how they explained the Destiny's power source in Stargate Universe. ^^
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That was indeed how the Destiny was powered. Well, actually, I think they were harvesting from the chromosphere, or maybe the photosphere? It doesn't really matter; it was one of the upper layers of a star.
But we're a long way from being able to enter a star's atmosphere and survive to leave again, if we ever get there at all. As
On the other hand, harvesting from the solar wind would be a lot more practical. Just passively riding the solar wind on a solar sail is already a perfectly feasible, albeit slow, means of propulsion; fusing the protons that hit your sail will of course improve the thrust, at the cost of needing to coast while in interstellar space because you're not carrying any fuel of your own. Or you could store them and use them for propulsion after the solar wind runs out, at the cost of having your solar sail be less efficient because you're not reflecting the particles hitting it. Either would be reasonable; I think the first would be more efficient, but the second would allow you the freedom to accelerate in interstellar space.
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Hmmm, interesting. Would it be possible to shield from or negate the magnetic field of the sun around the craft? Say, create an extended magnetic field around the craft, and then use the scoop? Or would one mess with the other?
As for the solar sails, I've rather liked that idea for a while, but I never really thought of it as something that would be useful outside a solar system, let alone for long treks through space. Maybe for between one or two planets(depending on how far apart they are), but that would seem to be about it. Maybe something like a repair ship or a orbital docking area? Something that could use the power, but not have to travel very far.
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No, the only way to deal with the solar magnetic field is to overpower it where you're trying to work. It's just not practical to harvest directly out of the sun unless you can withstand the heat of getting close.
A solar sail won't get you across interstellar space very quickly, it's true, but neither will anything else we could conceivably build in the near future. A solar sail is never going to get you going faster than the solar wind moves, of course, but that only puts the limit at 800,000 m/s, and that's quite fast, even if it would take you about 1600 years to even reach Alpha Centauri at that speed. Interstellar space is big, and we just don't currently have the capacity to handle it.
On the other hand, if we could generate stable wormholes . . . there's a very cool idea I heard once. Assume we somehow have a stable wormhole. We put one end in space, and anchor the other at the end of a particle accelerator. When we shoot particles through the wormhole, the free end is accelerated by conservation of momentum, and rather quickly given that we can use the LHC as a rocket engine. Even better, we get to measure the time it takes for the free end to reach whatever destination we may choose in the reference frame of the free end, so we can have a wormhole stretching across light-years in mere weeks if we put enough power into it. It might be problematic to open the wormhole wide enough for travel, but we could at least observe through it easily enough, and the opportunity to observe exoplanets from close range is pretty impressive.
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I've actually rather liked the idea of wormholes as a means of travel. Especially after the different Stargate series. Although, they way they did it, made it seem a bit faster XD
Another idea I rather liked the idea of an Alcubierre Drive being able to lower the density of a ship to the point where it would literally pull space in front of it and stretch it behind it.
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Well, wormhole travel is very convenient when you have a way to generate wormholes on demand between with their ends already light-years apart. But I have a feeling that if that's even possible, we'll have something even better by the time we know how to do it.
Maybe if we get good at cryogenically freezing people by the time I'm old, I'll do that, and say that I should be woken to see the first interstellar spaceship leave. I'd like to know how we end up doing that, when we eventually leave the solar system.
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Same here. I would very much like to see what we eventually use. ^_^
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I would not trust any machinery designed and built by Pinkie Pie. The potential for catastrophe to anypony but her seems obvious.
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Just another reason why I'm afraid of Pinkie's brain.
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I absolutely ADORE Pinkie Pie's pose in the second panel. She's just so cheerful! =3 I'd love to see her oft-mentioned genius in action in the 5th season. Loved the comic. ^_^
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Mixed with Pinkieology, yes.
"Yes, my major is in Contraptionology, with a minor in Pinkieology... Yes, as in Pie... What? What do you mean, 'you don't give grants for that'?"
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Cecci-bola and Isarleie! I found the connection in them! Them, and all the other brands as well!
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Pinkie Pie is so bizarre that I won't even bother trying to understand her. Congratulations, you represented her perfectly.
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And Pinkie won the Nobel prize. Congratulations, Pinkie!
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Wow, seems like Twilight has got something to learn from Pinkie
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LoL Not even Twilight can understand what Pinkie was saying.
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no pinkie thats a rocket
a guy heild me up in my car while i was reading this. he had a gun. he told me everything about the universe.
the gun was a ray gun. and we drove on a street somwere in new york and saw a wild shrek.
we shot him 10 times. shrek is love shrek is dead
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And thus, Pinkie Pie won the Nobel Prize for using such a "simple" formula to create a flying vehicle known as the Pink-a-copter.
That description though. Simply hilarious! XD
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ehehehehehehe
and pinkie is still an enigma for me
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BULLCRAP! Half of that wasn't even real words!
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You never cease to make my day.
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Well, no wonder Twilight's confused. Pinkie said that the ramjets were based on hydrogen rather than deuterium, apparently unaware that deuterium is a hydrogen isotope. (Eye roll)
If they were not, in fact, deuterium based, then that probably means they used protium. This is highly unlikely, however, as protium lacks the neutrons necessary to facilitate useful nuclear manipulation. So they probably DO use deuterium after all, and Pinkie was just being silly.
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Crap; I meant protium. For anyone who knows what they're talking about it's apparent I do not study this field at all and did not research this enough.
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No, no, I was making a nerd joke.
You shouldn't need to know the particular isotope forms of an element to have a character rattle off a string of technobabble. I was just being silly.
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Pinkie should be hired by NASA any day now.
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HAHAHAHAGAHA! TWILIGHT'S CLUELESS!!
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