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 of force and cent of speed, we can make our scale of power the rate energy is delivered by something pushing with ton force at cent speed. In Talent Mile units, which are always in the background for me, this is a 1000 oc force pushing at 1/100 of a mile a minute and works out to 10 ponies. But I don't need to insist on that—in conventional Earth terms it is 3600 watts or about 5 horsepower..

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