Onto the Pony Planet--Chapter 14 notes · 2:41am May 20th, 2014
A huge thanks to my pre-readers: Humanist, AnormalUnicornPony, metallusionsismagic, PunIntended Consequences, Woonsocket Wrench, and my parents.
Noble Voice—my initial plan was to give the lawyer ponies Latin names. I did a lot of research on legal latin terms, and decided to call him Vox Nobiliis, which I thought meant 'voice of the nobles.' It doesn't; vox optimates is the correct translation. However, one of my pre-readers advised that unless I used a very common, well-known Latin phrase, many of my readers would miss the reference, and suggested that I instead stick to plain English. He and I agreed on Noble Voice.
(unrelated, but a good excuse to use this picture)
Professor Laureate is the fan name of one of the professors at Twilight's entrance exam.
Gerard is a French name, meaning 'brave spear.'
"Rave!" is a Lyonnais word. It roughly translates to 'heck'; for my French-speakers, it's the Lyonnais version of zut.
Why Lyonnais? Well, based on some of the very slim evidence in the show, griffons may be French. Gustav was, anyway. Gilda—who knows? It seemed to me that the griffons might not speak pony French, but rather their own dialect.
I set my linguist on a research project of French dialects: The longer version is that I need a language name for the griffons (half eagle, half lion), and I was thinking, since one of them in the show has a French name and speaks with a French accent, that they could perhaps speak a regional variant of French. If it can easily be made into a pony or lion (or eagle, I suppose) pun in either French or English, so much the better.
After a day of research, she suggested I use Lyonnais dialect (convient lion pun!), and found an online French-to-whatever dictionary. Of course, the drawback—and why I couldn't do it on my own—is that I don't speak French.
I had intended for Gerard to say a couple of words in Lyonnais, but just before I asked her the question, she left town to go to a conference. It didn't take me too long to exhaust my knowledge of French (mind you, the whole web site is in French) without finding any particularly suitable words. So, I settled on zut, since it was one of the few words I recognized easily from the list.
Chief Threeclaw—in the show, griffons are drawn with three fingers and a thumb, which is a common cartoon convention (because fingers suck to draw). For what it's worth, real-life eagles have four total talons, so in this case the cartoon got it right.
Le Quadrille De Homards is the French name of a chapter of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It's called The Lobster-Quadrille or The Mock Turtle's Song. Can anyone guess why I picked that particularly? Because it's got a griffon in it!
Ganix is the Basque form of John.
Gorka is the Basque form of George.
Tapping the telegraph line—in old Westerns, the telegraph line was often tapped by connecting another wire to it, which lead to a listening device, or—in some cases—a telegraph key.
Further research suggests that this may not work—while my father confirmed that he had also seen it in books and movies, in real life, the message will take the path of least resistance, which is not the telegraph key. However, if you cut the line, and put the telegraph key between the two cut ends, you're good to go. There were special line clamps designed for this purpose, so a telegrapher could set up at the scene of a train accident, splice into the line, and send messages back and forth.
Of course, the ponies aren't using the same kind of telegraph that humans did, so I'll stand by my system, which works not by sending a current, but rather by grounding an existing current. That ought to work anywhere in a circuit.
Navigation lights are not something that we've ever seen in the show—as far as I can recall—but it makes sense that if there are a bunch of pegasi working the weather at night, they would be using lights so that they could avoid each other more easily. And they do have hot-air balloons, airships, and even pedal-powered helicopters; any one of these could collide with a pegasus. Especially if it's being flown by a crazy earth pony.
This might not actually be a necessary precaution; IRL birds, bats, and so on get on perfectly fine without them, and I don't think that midair collisions between birds are a significant problem. On the other hand, I've never seen birds moving around clouds to set up a midnight thunderstorm, so there's that.
I'll give you a really freakin' good one!
Lyonnesse
Using Lyonnais is simply brilliant for another reason: Several fan interpretation's, especially the Lunaverse, have the Griffon's as the HRE. Lyon, while part of France was given to Loithair I when Louis the Pious died and Charlemagne's empire was broken up. As such, it was part of the HRE until the 14th century. Lyon also acted as a regional center and counterbalance against Paris, especially in banking, even as part of France. Making it sort of "French, but also not French" at the same time (Literally. Lyon was settled by the Burgundians, from which we also get the French Duchy of Burgundy, who were a closely related Germanic Tribe to the Franks, but not the same tribe. Which often led the Duchy to try and assert some level of independence from the French crown, most famously under the de Valois dukes, cousins to the French King, between 1364-1477. Which plays rather well off the difference between the Prench Ponies and the Griffons you have set up.)
If you really want a native french speaker with a quirky accent I can suggest a few people who are first language french speakers... of the Quebecois variety.
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Pffft. Quebecois isn’t French. Next thing you’ll say is that Americans speak English.
One thing you didn't mention is the details of the book code. Where did you get those from? I can see several weaknesses in the system that could give a decent cryptanalyst clues to break the code.
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Huh, I didn't know any of that. That's really cool! I envision the griffons as a group of scattered clans occupying various countries in the pony version of Europe, kind of at an uneasy peace with the ponies.
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That might be very handy in the future! I'll keep it in mind!
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Hey, we speak better English than the Aussies. They've condensed whole sentences into single words.
For example. In proper English: "I say, good chap, would you care to join me in the garden for a cup of tea and perhaps some biscuits?"
Australian: "Cuppa?"
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I mostly made it up as I went along.
What would make it difficult to break, in my opinion (and I may not have gotten this across well in the text) is that the griffons are continuing their way through the book as they look for letters, rather than using the same code for each instance of a particular letter. Thus, the first E might be 0102 (page one, line two), while the next E could be 1004 (page ten, line four), and so on. Once they reach the end of the book, they start over again. Combined with the fact that they use multiple books, and rather than give the title, use the code from the book they're using to make a standard phrase (which doesn't even have to make sense; it could be something like 'I am a peanut-butter umbrella') would make it very difficult for a cryptographer to break. Impossible, no.
If you can think of any ways to break the code--wholly or in part (besides the obvious method of the ponies getting copies of the books that the griffons are using, and figuring out the code phrase)--let me know, because that might be useful in a later chapter. The EIA is always looking for help!
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Made it up yourself? Not a bad piece of work, crypto is hard.
I figured they were not reusing codes. That would defeat the entire point of not using a simple substitution cipher. But the code itself gives several clues about how it works, and others are the result of sloppy encoding procedure.
1) The fact that they're only using two digits for the page number, means that they're limited to fairly short books; a hundred pages at most. (The books can be bigger, but you can only use the first hundred pages.)
2) Since they're working their way through the book front to back, the codes in any one message are going to be in ascending order; any codecracker worth his salt is going to notice that and realize that they're working from some sort of set list. Picking pages at random would be better.
3) A decent-sized book has maybe 40 lines per page. So the third digit in every code is never going to be higher than a five. Another clue that points a prospective cryptanalyst to the conclusion that they're using a book cipher.
4) Finding the right letter is not always going to be easy. For every plaintext letter, you need to find a line in the book that starts with that letter. In English for example, the letter e occurs 13% of the time. But only 2% of words start with e. You're going to have to start reusing codes sooner than you think, which opens you up to frequency analysis.
This one is made worse in combination with #2; since they're working in sequence through the book, they might have to skip several pages depending on which letter follows which (something which follows a frequency distribution just like individual letters). From this you can also deduce the use of multiple books, and establish a sort of 'fingerprint' for each book, certain patterns likely to turn up in messages encoded with Alice in Wonderland but not in one with The Canterbury Tales for example.
5) Starting each message with a standard phrase is actually a weakness. It ensures that each and every message contains the same partial plaintext. This is what's known in cryptanalysis as a crib, a small piece of text you can be reasonably sure is contained somewhere in the message you're trying to break. In the breaking of the Enigma cipher during WWII for example, cribs were used to great effect to crack the daily codes, by assuming for example that 'HEILHITLER' would be somewhere in the message and working from there.
And even if they don't deduce the code phrase, simply starting every message the same way reduces the randomness and weakens the code. It's also not even necessary; if you use the wrong book you'll get gibberish anyway.
Finally, the fact that the basics of the scheme are easily deduced from the ciphertext means the EIA could simply try to bruteforce the task of finding the right book. You don't have to try every book, with some basic logic you could narrow the field down a lot. Widely available, not a lot of different editions, no more than x lines on a page, etc.
any chance we're going back to Earth soon? to see what's going on with the coast guard investigation.
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Yay! I got to spread knowledge! I'll admit, I like the idea of more clannish Griffons.
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I did think of addressing some of those issues with the code, but didn't for simplicity's sake. The 'standard phrase' might vary by day, and by who's sending the message, and the letter chosen could be the first, second, third, fourth, and so on, depending on the day of the week.
They could not go through the book in order, and they could put dummy letters in words. For example, you pointed out that the third digit would never be a five or higher (I actually counted 33 lines in an exemplar book, when I was coming up with this), so they could intersperse random digits with a 5 or higher, which the decoder would know to ignore.
But I think the griffons aren't that smart yet. I think they're too cocky; they feel that they've got an unbreakable code, and maybe they're not foresighted enough to know that the ponies won't announce when they've broken it, they'll just quietly translate the messages and know what the griffons are up to.
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Yes; Moller and Richter will be back within the next two chapters. I've already written their section.
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There are ways of ameliorating some of the flaws I mentioned, yes. But it wouldn't do much more than paper over the cracks; the underlying weakness remains. Homophonic substitution ciphers (of which this system is a variation) died out for a reason.
But I think it's better this way; it's believably flawed. In the real world, cryptography was practiced more or less on an ad hoc basis up until the 19th century. Once the full force of mathematics was brought to bear on the making and breaking of codes the standards for security went up enormously. Before then, it was a craft more than a science. Codes that would be considered trivial to break today (even with pen and paper, never mind computers) were used widely and often successfully. This system just fits in the setting.
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That's kind of what I was thinking, too. I could have done some reading on algorithmic codes; I could have even described one that was nigh unbreakable (although for that they'd have to have a pretty complex codebook, or a griffon who's a genius at math). But it just didn't feel right.
Just as well you avoided the Latin name, since "Voice of the Nobles" is actually Vox Optimatum. Possessives should be in the genitive case.
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I could never remember what all the cases are, which is one of the reasons I did so poorly in Latin.
Maybe not quite the same as the navigation lights you were talking about, but we have seen something similar in the show:
img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20130420130249/mlp/images/thumb/d/db/Pinkie_Pie_guiding_Big_Mac_S2E24.png/640px-Pinkie_Pie_guiding_Big_Mac_S2E24.png
img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20121215151957/mlp/images/thumb/3/3e/Pegasi_about_to_fly_S3E07.png/640px-Pegasi_about_to_fly_S3E07.png
This is probably necroposting, but since I'm re reading the old chapters to pass time I figured I might as well comment.
If the transmission line is using a sufficiently high voltage, or if it is using a carrier frequency, you could tap the wire with only a single connection -- but the wire tap would itself need to be externally powered from another source to amplify the weak signal that leaks out that way.
For a transmission line that has both high voltage and carrier frequency however, the line itself would be "broadcasting" enough power, short range, that you could run the single-terminal wire tap off the emissions alone.
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I’m still responding to necroposts (eventually) so. . . .
My headcanon is that they’re using ambient magic for their carrier and grounding it for a signal (short grounds, long grounds, you’ve got a message), so poke a rod in the ground and attach a lead and you’ve got an improvised telegraph key. It also takes some inspiration from the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Trainphone system, which used nearby phone/telegraph lines for short-range transmissions (i.e., locomotive to caboose). Not an electrical engineer or radio engineer, but when I ran it by a guy who knows things about electronics, he said ‘it might work.’
Homework assignment, what frequency do unicorn horns work on?
derpicdn.net/img/2021/2/28/2560925/large.jpg
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Thanks for being there!
Also, revisiting my comment has reminded me of a few more things to elaborate on:
1. While the common adage of "the path of least resistance" is good enough for everyday experiences with current, it's not fully accurate. It's rather that, most of the current follows the path of least resistance. Current will flow through all possible paths and even some seemingly impossible paths, split in proportion to their relative resistances. So current will leak out the side of a wire into a device because, even though it has a high resistance, it doesn't have infinite resistance.
2. Powering a device entirely off a broadcasted signal is how crystal radios work! They are so energy efficient that the energy borne by the radio wave itself is sufficient to run their circuits. That said, without external help they only just barely manage to drive specialized earphones made for low power. It's also how RFID/NFC tags/cards work; it doesn't take a lot to power a small memory chip.
EDIT:
Other examples include clamp ammeters as well as AC probes.