#mylittlepony - #Equestrian Bureau of Weights & Measures

Equestrian Bureau of Weights & Measures

Follow-up from last week's discussion.

Anyway, it seems the primary units that ponies concern themselves with seem to be length, volume, and mass. They do not seem like they need to use equivalents for the entire SI base unit set, due to magic negating the need for many other types of measurement.

During the negotiations to formalize the founding of Equestria, ponykind agreed to standardized conversions between their units. However, most local communities continue to trade in their traditional units, especially in places historically dominated by unicorns and earth ponies (pegasi mostly use metric or dimensionless ratios and other natural units for their weird flight calculations)

Length

Small and medium distances

• 1 shoe = 1 apple ( = 1 hand = 4 inches)
• Roughly the width of a size 0 horseshoe
• The shoe is the official unit, but earth pony enclaves still call it the apple
• Divided into 16 heads (average width of a nail head, ~¼") per shoe and 12 seeds per apple (rough length of an apple seed, ⅓ of an inch)
• Canterlot uses the Celestial Horseshoe, which is based on Celestia's golden footwear. 36 heads long.
• Height is measured in a similar manner to IRL horses: unicorns record heights such as 10 10/16 whereas earth ponies would use 10.7 or 10.8 to measure the same height.

Travel Distances

• The "long field" comes from some old legend about lining up 40,000 of Celestia's shoes from end to end. We'd know it as 7,500 feet (or about 1.42 miles/2.23km)
• An easy day's travel is about 14 long fields (just shy of 20 miles, accommodates families traveling with foals)
• A hard day's gallop away is 70 long fields or around 159km. This is about the maximum a well-conditioned and determined pony can cover in a single day.
• Pegasi can fly for longer: what ground-based ponies consider to be an easy day's travel, pegasi can do in about 90 minutes to two hours. However, they rarely can go farther than twice that distance in a single flight without stopping for rest, so their maximum daily travel is only around three times that of ground ponies, especially once foals are involved.
• Pegasi flying endurance races can go up to 225 long fields (500km) in a day, however, this takes preparation and the proper body type (Rainbow Dash is a small & light speed demon and could not physically fly one of these without stopping for rest and food and get a bad time or die from exhaustion or an exhaustion-induced crash). I'd estimate a race like this would be halfway across Equestria. A week-long race at a slower pace could circumnavigate Equestria's perimeter.

Magic

This is roughly equivalent to the Ampere (in also that the Ampere is also a "big" unit). It's a rough calculation of a unicorn's raw power, measured in percent of the magical strength of the princesses. To compensate for different unicorns having differing talents, it's measured in a battery of tests where the best three get averaged (so super-specialized unicorns get nerfed but somewhat generalist unicorns appear more powerful). Anything over 10 is considered impressive. Collections of unicorns do not scale linearly when measuring at a specific task (so a group of 20 11 power unicorns would still have a harder time raising the sun than Celestia), but an eclectic collection of unicorns can (on parchment) appear more powerful than the princess. Also somewhat used as a unit of brightness, luminosity, and temperature.

Weight

• 1 stone (Equestrian) = 1 stone (human) = 14 lbs
• 1 boulder = 200 stone (a bit less than 2.5 long tons or something)
• 50 pebbles = 1 stone
• 100 grains = 1 pebble = an apple (unicorns used to use apples for weight while earth ponies prefered pebbles)

Volume

• The head: approximate volume of water displaced from a full barrel when a mare completely submerges her head while bobbing for apples.
• Barrels are sold in many sizes with the calculations based on what they were meant to store, rather than an absolute measure of volume (so a 1-pony barrel is meant to a single pony for barrel-riding a waterfall, but a similar barrel may be a 250 apple barrel, even if the absolute volume of the barrel is 300 times the volume of a single apple)

Base system

Probably base 12 (if they count with their teeth, more common with earth ponies and pegasi) or 9 (3 positions for each front hoof ^ 2 hooves, more popular with unicorns). (Thanks, /u/logarithmicon)

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Those of you who have done mathematical calculations for world-building your stories, are my calculations reasonable? I'm assuming that the ponies are really more Falabella horse and less Shetland pony.

Did I forget any unit that may come up in daily use by a society of magical equines?

Submitted May 24, 2018 at 02:35PM by PUBLIQclopAccountant
via reddit https://www.reddit.com/r/mylittlepony/comments/8lvy0l/equestrian_bureau_of_weights_measures/?utm_source=ifttt