Onto the Pony Planet--Chapter 2 notes · 1:02am Oct 6th, 2013
A huge thanks to my pre-readers!
Humanist
AnormalUnicornPony
metallusionsismagic
Woonsocket Wrench
My Parents
The reference to the Crystal Empire being an Equestrian territory is from DGD Davidson’s The Mixed-Up Life of Brad.
The correct quote is “The force is strong WITH this one,” as all Star Wars fans know.
While shops are safer than they were, when my grandfather was looking for a job in the thirties, he watched a man get killed during his tour of a spring factory. He didn’t take that job (it was offered—there was a vacancy).
The extent of Kate’s hand injury
Non-spoiler non-graphic summary: the severity of Kate’s hand injury would almost certainly require amputation in a terrestrial hospital. The description is glossed-over, since I don’t want to include a ‘gore’ tag on the story. Before you mouse over the spoiler text, know that I felt a slight bit of nausea describing the injury—both in the story and the blog post. And you don’t want to know what I had to research, you really don’t. Sometimes Google Images isn’t your friend.
WARNING: not for the squeamish
WARNING: Spoilerish, especially for readers who didn’t read Celestia Sleeps In
The injury to Kate’s hand was caused by the taser exploding and melting in her hand. This would most likely have two results: arc burns and thermal burns.
Thermal burns are bad. As most readers know, there’s four degrees of thermal burns. A first degree burn is red and painful, much like a sunburn. A second degree burn has blisters, too, and extends into the deeper layers of skin. This type of burn may require skin grafts and will probably leave scars. A third degree burn goes all the way through the dermis. The good news is that it’s painless to the touch—all the nerve endings are dead. The bad news? Skin grafts or amputations are the usual treatment (assuming it’s something that can be amputated). Fourth degree? That’s burned to the bone, and the best case is that it’s on a part of the body that can be amputated.
If that wasn’t bad enough . . . arc burns are even worse. They tend to not leave much skin damage, rather causing deep tissue and organ damage. Amputation rate for arc burn sufferers is as high as 75%, according to Wikipedia.
Kate has second- and third-degree burns on the back of her hand, and fourth-degree burns on her palm and the insides of her fingers, and took an arc burn to the hand, too. Because of the thinness of the flesh on a hand, and the fact you don’t need them to live, I can say without qualification that a responsible hospital would probably amputate her hand without a moment’s hesitation. It’s believable that bones can be seen, and the tendons would be so badly damaged that her hand would be clutched into a permanent claw; even with skin grafts, she’d require extensive reconstructive surgery to restore some functionality to her hand.
The roll of electrical tape is to hold the bandage on. Most band-aids don’t cope so well with grease and dirt, and since mechanics and machinists often injure their fingers, something is needed to adhere the bandage. Electrical tape is resistant to most chemicals (except oils), so it’s the go-to choice, especially since most of us have some in our tool box. Personally, I don’t bother with a bandage unless the dripping blood is annoying. And—for those of you who are morbidly curious, at the point of writing this, I have a second-degree burn on the back of my right index finger, two cuts across the knuckle of my right middle finger, a cut on the inside of my left middle finger, and a mostly-healed burn on my left middle fingertip. The burn is the only one I bothered to bandage.
Mercurochrome is a topical antiseptic. It’s unbelievably cheap, fairly effective . . . and contains mercury, which is why you can’t get it in the US any more. My grandmother was a big believer in its efficacy, happily slathering it on any cuts or scrapes I got as a kid. It’s probably a little too modern for the ponies—but really, any antiseptic besides alcohol is.
He’d leaned with all his weight on the ratchet, stripping the teeth and slamming his hand painfully into the cutting bit.
I did that to myself on a shock absorber once; in a contest between the ratchet teeth and my weight, I won. A bandage and some electrical tape stuck the torn-off flesh back on, but it took over a year before the swollen lump of scar tissue went down; I’ve also got a raised scar on the side of my middle finger from a bit of disagreement with a brake lathe. Also worth knowing is that Dale is doing better in the finger-completeness department that I.
The Larry Niven story Dale’s remembering is ARM, first published in 1975. I re-read it recently, and one of the characters mentioned that instead of paying attention in school, he watched episodes of his favorite t.v. show on his pocket television. I looked over at my HTC Evo and thought, I can do that now.
I honestly had a little bit of trouble with the color mixing in the cartoon scroll. You see, colors are additive (they all provide one set of wavelengths of light) or subtractive (they absorb a specific set of wavelengths of light). Your primary subtractive colors (like in clothing, paint, crayons, etc.) are cyan, magenta, and yellow. For additive colors, the primaries are red, green, and blue. Back when I worked as a master electrician and lighting designer in a theatre, I only cared about the additive colors, of course, so I had to look up the subtractive color tables to remember what got mixed with what to make which colors. For those of you who are now thinking I made a terrible mistake: blue and green make cyan to a lighting designer—and isn’t Celestia the ultimate lighting designer? Printers and artists all know that with subtractive colors, blue and green make black.
“Cut through the chaff” The idiom in my first draft was ‘cut to the chase,’ but that’s too modern (thirties; not popular until the eighties). Besides, the meanings are slightly different: ‘cut to the chase’ means to skip the boring part; ‘cut through the chaff’ means to get to the heart of the matter.
. . .since everything worth discovering had been discovered.
Throughout the ages, this has been an continuing mantra. It was wrong then; it will probably be wrong a thousand years from now.
Improved blog!
Now with pictures!
Civil War era amputation kit
I half expected them to include a bucket of tar to seal the wound after amputation
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I think that had fallen out of favor by the Civil War.
EDIT: I looked through a slideshow of the procedure being done on a pig's leg, using the tools in that kit. They did have cloth bandages by the Civil War.
...How old are you?
I mean, you don't have to answer if you don't want to, but I'm reading things like "Back when I was a master electrician", and it gets me wondering.
This entire thing was super fascinating, though. I love when authors show their research for why they wrote something the way they did.
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36. I've had a lot of different jobs in a lot of different fields.
Master Electrician is a theatre description, too. It's the guy who's responsible for making sure the lights work and realizing the lighting designer's vision. It's not like a house electrician; I have very limited knowledge in that field.
That civil war era amputation kit is the most metal thing ever.