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Description
A commission for another one of the talented Estee’s short stories, “Tricks of the Trade Show”. This one does double duty as the intended cover to an eventual printed edition collecting a number of Estee’s works. (Hopefully the first of many volumes.)
I really love stories about Rarity, especially prequels like this one which show just how much effort she had to expend in order to make her dream career come true. Rarity travels the long road to Canterlot with the father she feels she hardly knows in order to attend a fashion trade show where she will hopefully be discovered. She has the talent, and she has the drive, but as a young mare making her first step into the fashion world, does she really know what she’s getting herself into? And if this one shot doesn’t work out, what is left for her? Set in Estee’s more complicated version of the Equestria we know from the show, it’s an excellent read and highly recommended!
I really love stories about Rarity, especially prequels like this one which show just how much effort she had to expend in order to make her dream career come true. Rarity travels the long road to Canterlot with the father she feels she hardly knows in order to attend a fashion trade show where she will hopefully be discovered. She has the talent, and she has the drive, but as a young mare making her first step into the fashion world, does she really know what she’s getting herself into? And if this one shot doesn’t work out, what is left for her? Set in Estee’s more complicated version of the Equestria we know from the show, it’s an excellent read and highly recommended!
Edited
Imagine Anon reading that sign…
Our parents do not think like us in our time when one had pre-industrial measurement to rely on, they were common to very different measurement standards before a need to clean up with the metric system pressed on with the industry’s demand for greater precision and standardization. That said, we humans find it easy to have just one step with our two legs and thus can only count steps individually to measure how far a hundred steps are, a thousand steps for example. The ponies do not have this opportunity.
We do not know how long the industry has existed in Equestria, but since the roads have seen nothing but muscle-powered vehicles based on the pony’s endurance ability that is more limited than the human
s, it is possible that the measurement concept here is only based on pre-industrial practice. In fimfiction, various measurements are observed, such as the use of hoofs in "Star Trek: A Knights Gambit" - and forelegs (which can be equated with the ell in our world, very practical in construction and boat building). The hoof and the foreleg can be used to measure the distance of loose objects and then have as a building standard, just as with the ell and the inch in our world. It is precisely how we measure these that are built, by using our own bodily lengths on limbs. The ponies can do the same with their hooves and very flexible forelegs. From the "If wishes were ponies" Harry Potter crossover, we have the term "celestial" at the length of a pony, in this case Princess Celestia. Slightly loosely defined there, but a celestial is longer than one meter. 1.6 meters, I think. Would have gone for a little more, but the horse's length is 2.4 meters. The G5 ponies are a little less than 1 meter tall, which seems to be the standard height for the G4 ponies according to many fans. Pony length will not be so practical, after all we do not have measurement at our own heights, so this must be an artificial concept to have universal distance measurement. If 1.6 meters is a "celestial", it means that 10 celestial is 16 m, 100 c becomes 160 m, and 1000 c 1600 m. But we have seen several times that many who had worked on the MLP show, do not like long-winded and heavily digested measurement concepts. After all, the show was intended for children who are going to learn simple math in schools. Everything that thus emerged as here is fanon-created. I like the idea of .1g for road use, as this could slip into pre-industrial practice and replace the humans practice of steps with one foot at a time, as the ponies can hardly do it with four hooves, and which have different gaits to use in contrast to the human.what
Impressive how an engineer can make such a dissertion on a pun.
It’s well build, but something is not totally right. Why would they make such a complex system and not standarize it?
Even imperial system had some logic behind it (the first one to had so, in fact). Feets and grains are fairly consistent, and many other units were rounded based on that, something not too unlike using the meter to build all the metric system around it.
If they used it, then they have to have another one, much more precise, to do calculations at a much smaller level. Or else, imagine construction workers building a skyscrapper. How long do they want it? .0.1G? That could be 150 meters or 300 meters, and as an engineer, you know the structural requirements for both are vastly different. Or the height of a pony. Will it be .0.001G?
And if they do have another more constant system for more precise measurements (Something like the cubit, based on Celestia’s hoof or whatever), why have 2 independent ones instead of basing one on the other? A regular pony might not mind if their treck is the human equivalent of 200 miles or 199.8 miles, but railway workers and civil engineers sure will. Even if just for budget planning.
We had much worse pre-industrial measurements than those around our own post-industrial measurements are based on scientific calculations based on universal values by distance and time. There is a sea of old and outdated measurement concepts and measurement values around the world that are much more imprecise and “inconsistent” - right up to the exact technological time Faust had set for the G4. Americans, for example, use bodily length measurements such as inches taken from unknown historical figures - which vary from person to person when there was no strict standardization right up until the arrival of industry.
An artillery cannon three centuries ago is not measured by anything other than one standard; bullet weight. The weight of the iron ball used as ammunition, also when it comes to distance measurement. This is almost forgotten in hindsight, but the bullet weight has partly survived by British standards into the last century. This is due to transport needs, as one may be able to carry what can be transported and handled.
If a particular historical pony is used as a starting point for calculating how long a gallop will last before rest is required, it will not be so different from the example with the inch. A horse will not have a concept for time and distance, only on its own performance, how far one can gallop or trot for example. The horse is actually far more like a petrol car in our world, which continue as long as there is petrol in the tank. And we know that the ponies in the MLP G4 are strongly traditional as a result of Faust’s instructions.
If the pony can gallop on a certain medium without becoming too dull and without getting too worn, regardless of the variation in physical characteristics from pony to pony, and then measured it against the historical example - then it becomes an easy measurement that is easy to perceive. Of course, this will be very imprecise, but it seems that Equestria does not have universal measurement standards compared to us, as there are very large differences; the pegasi as flying creatures did not need to gallop, and unicorns are concerned with measuring magic more than anything else. The term .5g can mean the distance of an earth pony. Just three centuries ago, a human had to keep track of at least a dozen different measurement calculations. And it was different from country to country.
In fact, measurements for an intelligent animal that is actually a migratory animal that must be able to travel great distances over time, and be able to gallop from predators, will not be the same as for a human. After all, we measure by visual calculation. A legacy from when we were monkeys looking for fruit. The pony, on the other hand, must be in constant motion like a grazing herd animal - the equine animal in our world is not exactly very strongly attached to small territories. We have hands, they only have hooves.
In the G4 Equestria, there are no motor vehicles on the roads, only pony-drawn carriages. The ponies that go out on larger regional and national roads will have pack saddles or larger bags mounted on them, while those who pulled their own or others’ carriages will carry heavier loads. When the pony pulls the carriage in a trot, a two-beat gait, he can continue uninterrupted for many hours before rest is required - and it can be varied a bit, at its fastest over 40 km / h. Approximately 13 km / h to 20 km / h is common. That is why the horse in our world had created enormous empires in the past, with them warrior hordes could travel very fast and far in comparison with man on foot. And we know that the ponies are so strong, that they can run in the trot with carriages in tow as seen in IDW FiM # 88 when it was a race to Yakyakistan.
So the idea of using the gallop to have a distance to rely on to measure how far it is from point A to point B is logical. Because by stopping to exhale, it becomes possible to have a lower limit. In our world, the limit is 1.5 km to 3.0 km. We have “kilometers” and “miles” - 1 km and 1.6 km. Using 2.0 km as a medium, we have seen that the G4 ponies can run very fast in trot or gallop, it becomes possible to think that .1g means “a round in gallop”. As soon as it was decided, this is standardized into distance measurements.
After all, in older days we measured distance according to our own steps! For a pony that can continue much longer than a human even if the endurance ability is far better for the human, it will not make sense to measure their own steps - they had four hooves. Perseverance is more important for the pony who after all had to be able to escape predators, the gallop occurs for this purpose.
.1g can be divided, we know that the ponies understand very advanced mathematics, a result of the unicorns’ focus on magic they would measure and evaluate from ancient times. .0.5g or .0.2g for example. A human in Equestria will not be able to comprehend what he sees on the signs and on the information about the distances, but the ponies will. Also, one could have .1t for much longer distance measurement, but then this is impractical in everyday life.
That’s a very inconsistent measurement of distances. Even the USA americans have a more efficient system.
I concede that your idea is quite similar to the concept of Furlong, but might need more refinement.
An ordinary horse can not gallop more than 1.5 to 3.0 km before rest is required. If .1 g means 1.5 or 3.0 km, let’s say a medium of 2 km, it means that the distance from Ponyville to the sign is about 10 km. But since we could see Ponyville at less than 4 kilometers from where Rarity is, it must mean that it is for the road itself that had to go uphill towards the mountain. After all, Canterlot is within sight of Ponyville, probably between 10 and 25 km in the air line, the terrain meant that it takes time to get there on foot as by train.
20 km thus becomes realistic by translating it to .10g, but it can vary greatly between 15 km and 30 km. This idea of distance measurements according to the ponies’ own endurance ability has merits. We can thus have .1w for “walk” for longer journeys, with 7 km / h, .1t for “trot” in normal journeys of 13 km / h and last .1g for 40-48 km / h. But not through the distance one has traveled, but through the endurance ability, since they do not have machine operation on the ordinary roads. It would be logical to measure the distance according to the pony’s ability, not by distance within a time period.
Sure, this idea is starting to get really good.
Looks like it means gallops.
The rails we see there are probably in connection with construction work rather than railway activities, the ground for the rails is too weakly excavated. A train is very heavy, in our world several thousand tons for the heaviest. It is not the rails that carry the load, it just transferred the stresses to the ground. Technologically, this is what we see in the drawing, from the 1880-1920 period.
What does “.5g” mean on the signs? Is it a concept of distance?
In the story there’s friction with her parents as her mother doesn’t support her chosen career path and her father has been mostly absent on the road as a professional athlete.