I freely admit that, looking back at the first chapters, I wince at how clunky and clumsy I was when trying to present certain ideas. I think I managed to improve at that some, and I am trying to do better still.
I do continue using the protagonist’s udder as a plot point in future chapters.
The site is, unfortunately, nicknamed ’502fiction’ for a reason. I’m now wondering if I should cross-post the story to another site, such as FanFiction.net.
ruminating on the downsides of being a female cow would seem to be a good lesson in empathy for human females, but the point seems to be lost on her.
the Queen gives in quite quickly. Even in Equestria, surely there are many scammers and leeches and deluded people that a simple Pascal’s wager wouldn’t work.
Stealing from MoR? really? Most of the passage too?! Again, jumping to those specific bits are not what a non-LWer rationalist would do; instead, they’d point out something about perpetual motion or bombs. Don’t bring up time travel unless your character can actually say clearly how it would lead to time travel! (Grr, it’s not deducing if the character can’t even explain it, as I bet you can’t.) I note with disapproval the blatant theft in chapter 13 as well.
Would the character really expect the queen to know a word like ‘sapience’? I expect even most LWers would get it wrong and confuse it with ‘sentience’.
Hilarious udder joke. But I’m surprised any cow would be that flexible...
‘consultat’
‘Luna looked pained, and looked away from us both, which was answer enough’, isn’t this obviously an answer to her previous question about where she is in the timeline?
‘the deliberate act of some powerful being’ and where did this all of a sudden come from? Did perhaps the queens just listen to her story and were all like ‘oh yeah, I know what explains this, a powerful magical being!’ and she wasn’t all ‘that’s stupid and as bad an explanation as “magic” on a blank map’?
Enjoyed the rhyming, although I have no idea what that was all about.
Ch15:
″… I ripped the tag off of a mattress. How about you?” You know that it’s perfectly legal for the end-consumer to do that, right? Or is that the joke?
Not sure if I’m interested enough to keep reading, but at least it’s not a terrible fic.
the Queen gives in quite quickly. Even in Equestria, surely there are many
scammers and leeches and deluded people that a simple Pascal’s wager wouldn’t work.
The royals in this setting have been shown in other stories to be, generally, about as practical as characters in a cartoon aimed at children tend to be—eg, holding onto letters from a pirate until a bunch have been collected, to read them all at once, instead of as they come in. That said, they are also known to have powerful magic—including, as a significant factor in this story, several forms of honesty-detection.
Stealing from MoR? really?
I’ll admit that most of that wasn’t the best choice I could have made. If I ever do a rewrite, that bit will be one of the most thoroughly rewritten bits.
Don’t bring up time travel unless your character can actually say clearly how it would lead to time travel! (Grr,
it’s not deducing if the character can’t even explain it, as I bet you can’t.)
I note with disapproval the blatant theft in chapter 13 as well.
The character in question was plucked from Earth from early April, 2012. Another note for a future rewrite might be to more explicitly mention that she’s drawing ideas from certain pieces of rationalist fiction.
Hilarious udder joke. But I’m surprised any cow would be that flexible...
I checked. They can indeed do so—it can cause a significant degradation of output, so dairies sometimes have to train cows to not do so.
‘Luna looked pained, and looked away from us both, which was answer enough’, isn’t this
obviously an answer to her previous question about where she is in the timeline?
I’m not quite sure what you mean. If it helps—in the cartoon, Luna was banished for a thousand years, after becoming a monster who tried to place the land under eternal night, her return and rehabilitation forming the plot of the first episode.
‘the deliberate act of some powerful being’ and where did this all of a sudden
come from?
This refers to the initial few lines of the first chapter, when the protagonist was punted by a mysterious stranger into Equestria; and is more thoroughly dealt with in a later chapter.
Enjoyed the rhyming, although I have no idea what that was all about.
The zebra in question is a character from the cartoon, who has the quirk of speaking in rhymes.
Ch15:
”… I ripped the tag off of a mattress. How about you?” You know that
it’s perfectly legal for the end-consumer to do that, right? Or is that the joke?
Yes, that was the intended joke there. After all the protagonist was jailed for the crime of ‘littering’, after doing carefully undescribed things to the unicorns who attacked her.
Not sure if I’m interested enough to keep reading, but at least it’s not a terrible fic.
Given the differences between the audience here and the standard audience at FimFiction.net—a response like that was the best I aimed for.
The character in question was plucked from Earth from early April, 2012. Another note for a future rewrite might be to more explicitly mention that she’s drawing ideas from certain pieces of rationalist fiction.
Eh. You can make up in-universe reasons, but it still comes off as sloppy… a good idea should be independently inventable or findable.
I checked. They can indeed do so—it can cause a significant degradation of output, so dairies sometimes have to train cows to not do so.
Wow. I guess I have learned something from this fic.
This refers to the initial few lines of the first chapter, when the protagonist was punted by a mysterious stranger into Equestria; and is more thoroughly dealt with in a later chapter.
So we’re supposed to infer that that was part of what she told the queens and they in turn immediately zeroed in on it as the best explanation? Still feels like a hole.
More notes:
ch34: use of Laplace’s law painfully didactic. It’s perfectly valid to use it in those circumstances, but it could have been explained so much better. For example: “Why should I go in? Half the times I’ve visited before, they’ve tried to kill me. Why should I expect that to be different now?”
And then you can have her ruminate something like “that was actually a valid bit of reasoning; it was called Laplace’s Law on Earth, where Laplace asked if something had happened 1 out of, say, 10 times, and that was all you knew, how much should you expect it to happen again? 2 / 12; half the time you’ll be too high and half too low, which is the best you can hope to do.”
I bet you can come up with an even clearer explanation. You’re the fic writer, after all.
a good idea should be independently inventable or findable.
I’m only aiming to write my protagonist as being an aspiring Bayesian rationalist, not a Yudkowsky-level or HJPEV-level one. In a later chapter, while her emotions are being artificially manipulated, her inner monologue reads:
I’m so jealous of… of… the people who are actually smart. I’m well aware that I’m not nearly as smart as I like to think I am. All my seeming cleverness—it’s all just tricks, things that anyone can do if they knew. I can’t do anything that requires real intelligence, like come up with a truly new theory—the best I’ve been able to do is come up with ‘new’ insights that others have come up with so many times before. What I wouldn’t give to develop an actual new idea, think a thought that hasn’t been thought before—to be the first one to understand something...
… which, I hope, describes what I’ve been aiming for reasonably well.
Still feels like a hole.
Then it quite probably is one.
ch34: use of Laplace’s law painfully didactic.
Well, at least I know I was able to get across the idea that she was being painfully didactic. What I seem to have failed at is explaining that it was the didactness she was going for at that point, and Laplace’s law was simply one of many possible topics for her to natter about.
Well, at least I know I was able to get across the idea that she was being painfully didactic. What I seem to have failed at is explaining that it was the didactness she was going for at that point, and Laplace’s law was simply one of many possible topics for her to natter about.
They’re ponies; they know nothing about statistics. You say many have barely a gradeschool education, and this is a guard pony to boot. Any statistics will confuse them and be painfully didactic, but by making it simply unclear and assuming all sorts of stuff without justification, you waste a chance for the reader to actually understand the material and learn from it.
A few other authors in the same shared universe have started doing such rewrites. I’m leaving it open as an option for myself, for when I get to the point that I no longer want to try continuing my current chapter-a-day push.
After reading the founding stories, which I greatly enjoyed, I noticed a few other people writing in the same setting—and I noticed that each one seemed to be trying to top the previous one about what sort of cool species to write about, and how many super-powers and magic weapons and such to give their characters.
So I thought about writing about someone turned into a simple cow.
One of the setting’s first authors said ‘sure’, and I tried putting together a few chapters… then a few more… and I haven’t found a reason to stop, yet.
(Admittedly, my own protagonist has been collecting her own set of tricks and magical gizmos—eg, it turns out that cows are closely related to ponies in the setting’s mythology, so I gave them the job of unknowingly taking the local point-sources of magical energy and spreading them out into an even magical field across the country, the way that the cartoon’s pegasi even out the weather; but I’ve at least tried to make such tricks the result of actual research and investigation, including the occasional experiment that blows up in her face.)
I’m up to chapter 47 now and greatly enjoying it, (though it is distracting me from my work somewhat.).
Couple of random thoughts:
Missy seems to be able to reconstruct quite a lot of technology entirely from memory, which stretches my suspension of disbelief somewhat. This may be a case of generalising from a single example but while I understand radios in theory I doubt I could build one (the amplifier idea is interesting though, nice to see a difference emerging in the physics of the world). I could probably build a very basic firearm with time and materials, but not the complex one Missy seems to have produced quickly.
I’m enjoying the musical interludes, the general theme of mid-century vocalists is nice, gives some thematic unity.
Missy as a character seems a little under-defined other than her rationalism. We don’t really hear much about his life on earth and what background they have. Is that deliberate? Possibly some fleshing out of their past would make their rationalism and encyclopaedic knowledge of science more plausible.
Having them as a cow is a really cool idea, not just in physical limitations but the situation of being transferred into the body of an oppressed minority makes for some interesting situations.
(though it is distracting me from my work somewhat.).
You’re the second person to mention that I’ve managed to induce at least a minor case of JOMT, which I take as a high compliment.
Missy seems to be able to reconstruct quite a lot of technology
entirely from memory, which stretches my suspension of disbelief somewhat.
This may be a case of generalising from a single example but while I understand radios in theory I doubt I could build one (the amplifier idea is interesting though, nice to see a difference emerging in the physics of the world).
I could probably build a very basic firearm with time and materials, but not the complex one Missy seems to have produced quickly.
I probably over-did it with getting a firearm manufactured so quickly. I’d recently read a news article about some 3D printers now being capable of creating most parts of a firearm; I decided that Missy is more into the Maker subculture than I am, and not only looked into the mechanics of how an automatic pistol worked, but remembered enough about specific details to be able to put together plans for Royal-sponsored workshops to build from.
The most implausible part about Missy’s wireless device… is, actually, the earphones; unamplified crystal radios output a signal requiring earphones with a different resistance from standard ones.
A minor spoiler for the chapter I plan on finishing writing today: Missy is about to try to grab a new revenue stream, independent of her previous sources of funding, by ‘inventing’ a whole series of easily-manufactured Earthly items… a set which is much more plausible to put together than even a radio.
I’m enjoying the musical interludes, the general theme of mid-century vocalists is nice, gives some thematic unity.
I’ve been discussing with some of the other authors about switching musical channels after chapter 60, going to They Might Be Giants, Jonathan Coulton, Weird Al, and their ilk. Haven’t firmly decided one way or the other, yet.
Missy as a character seems a little under-defined other than her rationalism. We don’t really hear much about his life on earth and what background they have. Is that deliberate? Possibly some fleshing out of their past would make their rationalism and encyclopaedic knowledge of science more plausible.
Now this… is both a good point, and something that I can try working on.
I’ve been using the excuse that Missy has been trying to hide her Earthly origins entirely, to avoid going into that; but it’s entirely possible I’ve been pushing too far with that. I’ll see what I can come up with that helps the story.
The pony world seems a lot darker than in canon or most fan works.
It is. Several other stories have pointed this out, and the conceit is that the cartoon we see has been framed to exclude any of the aspects of the setting which don’t fit into its TV rating.
Once one of the founding stories established in one of its first chapters that one of Equestria’s neighboring countries had a great many slave mines, which the Princesses weren’t doing anything about… the floodgates were opened. I actually wrote a short chapter specifically to point out that despite all the bad things going on, there were still lots of places which were as pleasant and peaceful as implied in the cartoon—they just tend to get skipped over in favor of describing more exciting locales.
Having them as a cow is a really cool idea, not just in physical limitations but the situation of being transferred into the body of an oppressed minority makes for some interesting situations.
Making firearms is not actually that easy. The 3D-printed one was actually just part of a firearm, and not the part that takes the highest stresses.
Missy should, in practice, have had at least the following problems:
For a breech-loading firearm, you need high-grade steel of a particular and uniform formulation. Up until quite recently, humanity did not understand the chemistry of steel well enough to do that. Ponyland is unlikely to. The alternative, unfortunately, may be the firearm blowing up in your face.
Very particular chemistries are required for the propellant. Gunpowder is hard to set fire to, makes smoke, and doesn’t provide much energy. The modern ideal of a propellant that explodes when hit hard, doesn’t explode when hit even slightly lighter, doesn’t explode if heated, doesn’t explode under production, doesn’t explode if you cool it down and doesn’t randomly explode if you stare at it is.. actually pretty hard to manage. You also want it to not produce too much smoke. Guncotton is one of the better alternatives at your tech level, but it involves nitroglycerin.. ’nuff said.
If you’re interested in the details of recreating modern science, I suggest you look up the 1632 series; the writers have done a lot of careful research. For what it’s worth, though, even doing a two-century jump (to late 1800s tech) is still a multi-year project when supplied with thousands of modern people, tens of thousands of down-timers, and a small modern city.
It wasn’t the part that takes the highest stresses, but it -is- the part which is identified as the firearm in the US—sort of like the motherboard isn’t the component of the computer which takes the highest stresses (that would be the processor), but is the part which is recognized by an OS as the computer. Additionally, it takes little machining skill to finish the gun from that point out of supplies you can find in most hardware stores. (Much less assembling the rest of the gun out of unregulated parts.)
Smokeless gunpowder is only desirable if you care about being spotted. Regular old gunpowder is easy to make (my chemistry lessons from my father—I was homeschooled for a substantial portion of my childhood—were very practical, and this is one of the things I learned to make.) and perfectly practical for just about every application you could want it for. Additionally, guncotton does not in fact require nitroglycerin; that’s only one of the two types that can be produced. (It invariably requires large quantities of nitric and sulfuric acids, however. Nitric acid is harder to come by than the raw materials for gunpowder, especially in the quantities needed, which will generally attract law enforcement attention. It’s not impossible to produce yourself, but difficult.)
Given that the firearm creation occurred some 50 chapters before what I’m writing now, and the result was successfully used for at least one plot-point, it would be a bit impractical to revise it just now. However, I can still keep these notes in case I do an eventual full rewrite; and these comments can be useful for filling in some as-yet-undescribed blank spots, such as helping to explain why none of the other game-pieces have managed to assemble their own modern firearms.
In case it was buried where some LessWrongers here didn’t read it, the point in the story that goes into the most detail about arranging for the creation of a firearm is in chapter 13, and reads:
“There is a certain project I had been meaning to get started, but which I haven’t been able to figure out how to introduce under the auspices of either The Dairy’s public or private sides. But as a quiet royal initiative...”
She nodded in understanding, and I went on. “It involves the production of a certain dangerous alchemical substance. Improper care and handling can easily lead to the loss of a hoof, or worse—but when finished, it has a number of applications. The final product consists of about two-thirds cellulose nitrate, which is produced by exposing cotton fibers to an equal blend of sulfuric and nitric acids; about one-third glyceryl trinitrate, which is made by adding glycerol to a similar acid mix, subsequently gelatinized with ether; and about one-twentieth part paraffin or petroleum jelly. There are a number of precautions which need to be taken in order to prevent accidents of various sorts...” I went on describing how to manufacture a generic sort of cordite from raw ingredients—sure, black powder was a lot easier to throw together, but why settle for an inferior product—and wondered whether it would be a good idea to also have Luna be in charge of putting together a hoof-compatible pistol and individual cartridges… but decided to handle that end of things myself. Most likely, I could get away with having a few lab-techs in the Dairy get the individual pieces put together, compartmentalized so none of them knew what the whole project was. I might have to get a bit of help figuring out a decent trigger which could be aimed and worked with hooves, but had a few basic ideas based on the chest-mounted cameras I’d seen in use.
So, trying to take as a given that the single firearm was, in fact, successfully built, then the next time I write about it, I could try describing the additional difficulties currently being described, and how overcoming those difficulties was accomplished.
For example, at that point in the story, the main character had access to the capital city’s top engineers and technicians, as well as the local magically-enhanced forges and manufacturing techniques. So while the gun itself may be entirely non-magical in its operation, Equestria might not be able to manufacture it without applying magic during the metal-casting processes. (Or something of the sort.) In general, Equestrian technology is roughly in the 1850′s-1870′s range, with various exceptions (eg, sound systems, airships) that often turn out to have a magical base.
Another background detail that is potentially useful for such not-quite-retconning is that the Princess to whom all this was being described has been shown to be able to collect information by appearing in other people’s dreams. It’s possible that she used this technique to help gather details that the protagonist didn’t know she knew, to help fill out any blanks required for proper manufacturing.
I freely admit that, looking back at the first chapters, I wince at how clunky and clumsy I was when trying to present certain ideas. I think I managed to improve at that some, and I am trying to do better still.
I do continue using the protagonist’s udder as a plot point in future chapters.
The site is, unfortunately, nicknamed ’502fiction’ for a reason. I’m now wondering if I should cross-post the story to another site, such as FanFiction.net.
Ch2-7:
ruminating on the downsides of being a female cow would seem to be a good lesson in empathy for human females, but the point seems to be lost on her.
the Queen gives in quite quickly. Even in Equestria, surely there are many scammers and leeches and deluded people that a simple Pascal’s wager wouldn’t work.
Stealing from MoR? really? Most of the passage too?! Again, jumping to those specific bits are not what a non-LWer rationalist would do; instead, they’d point out something about perpetual motion or bombs. Don’t bring up time travel unless your character can actually say clearly how it would lead to time travel! (Grr, it’s not deducing if the character can’t even explain it, as I bet you can’t.) I note with disapproval the blatant theft in chapter 13 as well.
Would the character really expect the queen to know a word like ‘sapience’? I expect even most LWers would get it wrong and confuse it with ‘sentience’.
Hilarious udder joke. But I’m surprised any cow would be that flexible...
‘consultat’
‘Luna looked pained, and looked away from us both, which was answer enough’, isn’t this obviously an answer to her previous question about where she is in the timeline?
‘the deliberate act of some powerful being’ and where did this all of a sudden come from? Did perhaps the queens just listen to her story and were all like ‘oh yeah, I know what explains this, a powerful magical being!’ and she wasn’t all ‘that’s stupid and as bad an explanation as “magic” on a blank map’?
Enjoyed the rhyming, although I have no idea what that was all about.
Ch15:
″… I ripped the tag off of a mattress. How about you?” You know that it’s perfectly legal for the end-consumer to do that, right? Or is that the joke?
Not sure if I’m interested enough to keep reading, but at least it’s not a terrible fic.
The royals in this setting have been shown in other stories to be, generally, about as practical as characters in a cartoon aimed at children tend to be—eg, holding onto letters from a pirate until a bunch have been collected, to read them all at once, instead of as they come in. That said, they are also known to have powerful magic—including, as a significant factor in this story, several forms of honesty-detection.
I’ll admit that most of that wasn’t the best choice I could have made. If I ever do a rewrite, that bit will be one of the most thoroughly rewritten bits.
The character in question was plucked from Earth from early April, 2012. Another note for a future rewrite might be to more explicitly mention that she’s drawing ideas from certain pieces of rationalist fiction.
I checked. They can indeed do so—it can cause a significant degradation of output, so dairies sometimes have to train cows to not do so.
I’m not quite sure what you mean. If it helps—in the cartoon, Luna was banished for a thousand years, after becoming a monster who tried to place the land under eternal night, her return and rehabilitation forming the plot of the first episode.
This refers to the initial few lines of the first chapter, when the protagonist was punted by a mysterious stranger into Equestria; and is more thoroughly dealt with in a later chapter.
The zebra in question is a character from the cartoon, who has the quirk of speaking in rhymes.
Yes, that was the intended joke there. After all the protagonist was jailed for the crime of ‘littering’, after doing carefully undescribed things to the unicorns who attacked her.
Given the differences between the audience here and the standard audience at FimFiction.net—a response like that was the best I aimed for.
Eh. You can make up in-universe reasons, but it still comes off as sloppy… a good idea should be independently inventable or findable.
Wow. I guess I have learned something from this fic.
So we’re supposed to infer that that was part of what she told the queens and they in turn immediately zeroed in on it as the best explanation? Still feels like a hole.
More notes:
ch34: use of Laplace’s law painfully didactic. It’s perfectly valid to use it in those circumstances, but it could have been explained so much better. For example: “Why should I go in? Half the times I’ve visited before, they’ve tried to kill me. Why should I expect that to be different now?”
And then you can have her ruminate something like “that was actually a valid bit of reasoning; it was called Laplace’s Law on Earth, where Laplace asked if something had happened 1 out of, say, 10 times, and that was all you knew, how much should you expect it to happen again? 2 / 12; half the time you’ll be too high and half too low, which is the best you can hope to do.”
I bet you can come up with an even clearer explanation. You’re the fic writer, after all.
I’m only aiming to write my protagonist as being an aspiring Bayesian rationalist, not a Yudkowsky-level or HJPEV-level one. In a later chapter, while her emotions are being artificially manipulated, her inner monologue reads:
… which, I hope, describes what I’ve been aiming for reasonably well.
Then it quite probably is one.
Well, at least I know I was able to get across the idea that she was being painfully didactic. What I seem to have failed at is explaining that it was the didactness she was going for at that point, and Laplace’s law was simply one of many possible topics for her to natter about.
They’re ponies; they know nothing about statistics. You say many have barely a gradeschool education, and this is a guard pony to boot. Any statistics will confuse them and be painfully didactic, but by making it simply unclear and assuming all sorts of stuff without justification, you waste a chance for the reader to actually understand the material and learn from it.
I’m really enjoying it so far. There are a few clunky bits but it doesn’t detract too much.
Perhaps if it becomes more popular you could rewrite the beginning and/or designate another chapter as a starting point?
A few other authors in the same shared universe have started doing such rewrites. I’m leaving it open as an option for myself, for when I get to the point that I no longer want to try continuing my current chapter-a-day push.
Why did you decide to write in a shared universe rather than a standalone fic?
After reading the founding stories, which I greatly enjoyed, I noticed a few other people writing in the same setting—and I noticed that each one seemed to be trying to top the previous one about what sort of cool species to write about, and how many super-powers and magic weapons and such to give their characters.
So I thought about writing about someone turned into a simple cow.
One of the setting’s first authors said ‘sure’, and I tried putting together a few chapters… then a few more… and I haven’t found a reason to stop, yet.
(Admittedly, my own protagonist has been collecting her own set of tricks and magical gizmos—eg, it turns out that cows are closely related to ponies in the setting’s mythology, so I gave them the job of unknowingly taking the local point-sources of magical energy and spreading them out into an even magical field across the country, the way that the cartoon’s pegasi even out the weather; but I’ve at least tried to make such tricks the result of actual research and investigation, including the occasional experiment that blows up in her face.)
I’m up to chapter 47 now and greatly enjoying it, (though it is distracting me from my work somewhat.).
Couple of random thoughts:
Missy seems to be able to reconstruct quite a lot of technology entirely from memory, which stretches my suspension of disbelief somewhat. This may be a case of generalising from a single example but while I understand radios in theory I doubt I could build one (the amplifier idea is interesting though, nice to see a difference emerging in the physics of the world). I could probably build a very basic firearm with time and materials, but not the complex one Missy seems to have produced quickly.
I’m enjoying the musical interludes, the general theme of mid-century vocalists is nice, gives some thematic unity.
Missy as a character seems a little under-defined other than her rationalism. We don’t really hear much about his life on earth and what background they have. Is that deliberate? Possibly some fleshing out of their past would make their rationalism and encyclopaedic knowledge of science more plausible.
The pony world seems a lot darker than in canon or most fan works. Gur vqrn bs cbal encr tnatf nccrnevat bhg bs abjurer hafrggyrq zr fbzrjung. Vagrerfgvat gung fbeg bs pnfhny betnavfrq ivbyrapr qvfgheorq zr zber guna svpf bs jne naq zheqre. Gur trareny nggvghqr bs gur aboyrf frrzf irel fvzvyne gb gubfr va UC:ZBE. Gubhtu gung frrzf snveyl pbafvfgrag jvgu gurz va pnaba.
Having them as a cow is a really cool idea, not just in physical limitations but the situation of being transferred into the body of an oppressed minority makes for some interesting situations.
You’re the second person to mention that I’ve managed to induce at least a minor case of JOMT, which I take as a high compliment.
I probably over-did it with getting a firearm manufactured so quickly. I’d recently read a news article about some 3D printers now being capable of creating most parts of a firearm; I decided that Missy is more into the Maker subculture than I am, and not only looked into the mechanics of how an automatic pistol worked, but remembered enough about specific details to be able to put together plans for Royal-sponsored workshops to build from.
The most implausible part about Missy’s wireless device… is, actually, the earphones; unamplified crystal radios output a signal requiring earphones with a different resistance from standard ones.
A minor spoiler for the chapter I plan on finishing writing today: Missy is about to try to grab a new revenue stream, independent of her previous sources of funding, by ‘inventing’ a whole series of easily-manufactured Earthly items… a set which is much more plausible to put together than even a radio.
I’ve been discussing with some of the other authors about switching musical channels after chapter 60, going to They Might Be Giants, Jonathan Coulton, Weird Al, and their ilk. Haven’t firmly decided one way or the other, yet.
Now this… is both a good point, and something that I can try working on.
I’ve been using the excuse that Missy has been trying to hide her Earthly origins entirely, to avoid going into that; but it’s entirely possible I’ve been pushing too far with that. I’ll see what I can come up with that helps the story.
It is. Several other stories have pointed this out, and the conceit is that the cartoon we see has been framed to exclude any of the aspects of the setting which don’t fit into its TV rating.
Once one of the founding stories established in one of its first chapters that one of Equestria’s neighboring countries had a great many slave mines, which the Princesses weren’t doing anything about… the floodgates were opened. I actually wrote a short chapter specifically to point out that despite all the bad things going on, there were still lots of places which were as pleasant and peaceful as implied in the cartoon—they just tend to get skipped over in favor of describing more exciting locales.
Thank you—I tried. :)
Making firearms is not actually that easy. The 3D-printed one was actually just part of a firearm, and not the part that takes the highest stresses.
Missy should, in practice, have had at least the following problems:
For a breech-loading firearm, you need high-grade steel of a particular and uniform formulation. Up until quite recently, humanity did not understand the chemistry of steel well enough to do that. Ponyland is unlikely to. The alternative, unfortunately, may be the firearm blowing up in your face.
Very particular chemistries are required for the propellant. Gunpowder is hard to set fire to, makes smoke, and doesn’t provide much energy. The modern ideal of a propellant that explodes when hit hard, doesn’t explode when hit even slightly lighter, doesn’t explode if heated, doesn’t explode under production, doesn’t explode if you cool it down and doesn’t randomly explode if you stare at it is.. actually pretty hard to manage. You also want it to not produce too much smoke. Guncotton is one of the better alternatives at your tech level, but it involves nitroglycerin.. ’nuff said.
If you’re interested in the details of recreating modern science, I suggest you look up the 1632 series; the writers have done a lot of careful research. For what it’s worth, though, even doing a two-century jump (to late 1800s tech) is still a multi-year project when supplied with thousands of modern people, tens of thousands of down-timers, and a small modern city.
It wasn’t the part that takes the highest stresses, but it -is- the part which is identified as the firearm in the US—sort of like the motherboard isn’t the component of the computer which takes the highest stresses (that would be the processor), but is the part which is recognized by an OS as the computer. Additionally, it takes little machining skill to finish the gun from that point out of supplies you can find in most hardware stores. (Much less assembling the rest of the gun out of unregulated parts.)
Smokeless gunpowder is only desirable if you care about being spotted. Regular old gunpowder is easy to make (my chemistry lessons from my father—I was homeschooled for a substantial portion of my childhood—were very practical, and this is one of the things I learned to make.) and perfectly practical for just about every application you could want it for. Additionally, guncotton does not in fact require nitroglycerin; that’s only one of the two types that can be produced. (It invariably requires large quantities of nitric and sulfuric acids, however. Nitric acid is harder to come by than the raw materials for gunpowder, especially in the quantities needed, which will generally attract law enforcement attention. It’s not impossible to produce yourself, but difficult.)
Given that the firearm creation occurred some 50 chapters before what I’m writing now, and the result was successfully used for at least one plot-point, it would be a bit impractical to revise it just now. However, I can still keep these notes in case I do an eventual full rewrite; and these comments can be useful for filling in some as-yet-undescribed blank spots, such as helping to explain why none of the other game-pieces have managed to assemble their own modern firearms.
In case it was buried where some LessWrongers here didn’t read it, the point in the story that goes into the most detail about arranging for the creation of a firearm is in chapter 13, and reads:
So, trying to take as a given that the single firearm was, in fact, successfully built, then the next time I write about it, I could try describing the additional difficulties currently being described, and how overcoming those difficulties was accomplished.
For example, at that point in the story, the main character had access to the capital city’s top engineers and technicians, as well as the local magically-enhanced forges and manufacturing techniques. So while the gun itself may be entirely non-magical in its operation, Equestria might not be able to manufacture it without applying magic during the metal-casting processes. (Or something of the sort.) In general, Equestrian technology is roughly in the 1850′s-1870′s range, with various exceptions (eg, sound systems, airships) that often turn out to have a magical base.
Another background detail that is potentially useful for such not-quite-retconning is that the Princess to whom all this was being described has been shown to be able to collect information by appearing in other people’s dreams. It’s possible that she used this technique to help gather details that the protagonist didn’t know she knew, to help fill out any blanks required for proper manufacturing.
Built-in userbase?
No, don’t. 502 not withstanding, that site is awesome.