Part 5 — Fireworks

At the moment the New Year begins, on some of these planets, people set off a great blaze of Roman candles, searchlights, laserbeams and what have you. It is a regular fountain of light! Their custom is to make the luminous power of the blaze reflect their planet's weight and surface speed as well. Imagine something pushing at the planet's surface speed with a force equal to the planet's weight. That would embody a definite power, determined by the planet's own benchmarks of speed and force.

How to measure and talk about the power of a lightshow? Since we have ton and dime as units of force and speed, we can use the tondime, the rate energy is delivered by something pushing with ton force at dime speed, as a unit of power. A tondime is 360 watts, and equal to about half a horsepower.

On the planet called Wildflower, the skimspeed is 10 dimes and the weight, because of the G proportionality, is 10 thousand tons. Multiplying the weight and skimspeed together we see that the power representing them must be 100 thousand tondimes. Since in Earth terms a tondime is 360 watts, the New Year's display at midnight on Wildflower must be 36 million watts! This show alone would make the trip worthwhile even if nothing else special happened.

The tondime unit of power represents just a bit too much effort to feel right as a human-scale unit of power. One way to imagine yourself delivering a tenth of a tondime (about 36 watts) is to think of pushing at a speed of ten dimes with a force of a hundredth of one of our tons (27 pounds). Because dime speed is slower than we usually move, ten dimes is actually an easier speed to imagine pushing something or raising something with a pulley.