FimFiction Link - Short ID: 488535/the-equine-starliner
Published: Feb '21 — Dec '21
This is a sci-fi fic by the same author as Hailey Potter ("The Boy Who Disappeared"). It has nothing to do with HP and isn't any kind of crossover, but it has exactly the same energy: the MCs are overpowered as fuck, and all authority figures are incompetent. (Also, like Hailey Potter, it's a rewrite of a rewrite.)
Some guy has designed a spaceship and needs someone to sponsor its launch. The usual "guilds" don't want it, so he turns to the Navy. It's supposed to be a passenger liner, but it has a decent number of normal guns, along with some experimental propulsion and weapon systems that seem like they're worth testing, so the Navy approves it. Ten minutes later, the guy gets hit by a car and dies.
The Navy administration, being authority figures, are necessarily incompetent. They launch the ship and send it out for a test flight, then once it gets back, they have to send another guy up to see what happened to the crew, because they've lost track of the fact that the test flight was run by the AI with no human crew. The guy gets on board and immediately turns into a pony. He still manages to check the test results and reports that the ship is ready for commissioning. After the Navy brings him back to earth and checks to make sure he's not about to die from the ponification, they decide it's safe enough to send up a full crew, consisting of 100,000 women. (For totally logical and not-at-all-contrived reasons, they decide to crew the ship entirely with women.)
The Navy administration, being authority figures and thus incompetent, neglected to send the crew any useful information about the ship's capabilities. So we get several chapters of the crewmares discovering one incredibly advanced ship system after another.
>there's a super-advanced AI being helpful behind the scenes (like predicting where people want to go in the lifts), though actually it's capable of running the entire ship autonomously
>the ship has non-centrifugal artificial gravity, which has never been done before
>pirates try to attack the ship and get oneshotted by one of the ship's experimental energy weapons
>the onboard farms grow plants at 700x normal speed, or over 1000x speed if an earth pony walks nearby at some point
>the fusion reactors automatically switch to "reverse generation" mode, burning excess food and converting the energy into fuel and ammunition (this works because earth pony crop growth violates conservation of mass)
>the AI designs upgrades for the reactors and starts installing them after one reactor is damaged by a stray basketball
>during a training exercise, they discover that the sensors can detect targets straight through a planet
>and the weapons can fire in curved trajectories to hit those targets on the far side
Eventually the author is going to run out of superpowers to hand out, and I'm really not sure where he intends to go in terms of plot after that.