New episode, new feat. In The Summer Sun Setback group of 4 ponies fire magic from their horns that hits the Moon and lights it up causing an image of a purple pony outlined on the moon to appear. Now, I've got no clue how to calc luminosity, or how to calc making that outline, but I do know it's a crazy good feat for speed.
Why should we use it? Because these are a group of professional ponies trained to do this. They are obviously well trained and considering they had to train and practice to apparently be able to do this right. It doesn't seem to be something any regular Unicorn can do. They ought to be at least mid to high tier unicorns (they are strong based on feats and their skill, but it is unknown how they scale to top tier unicorns such as Starswirl), especially when you have Chrysalis praising how powerful they are in her disguised state. This scales to at least from mid to high tier Unicorns and low tier Alicorns.
https://youtu.be/OP_vntZylOM?t=1230 Feat here. Sorry I have to use a reactor's video, but the one I used in this calc originally got taken down. If it's all the same to you, the timeframe I got in his video is exactly the same as what I got for my old one, so it's safe to use. The Unicorn to the far right with a red mane fires her beam at 20:30:72 and it hits the Moon at 20:31:52. So that is a timeframe of 0.8 seconds.
Granted, it's not a conventional magic beam, but taking into consideration Twilight has her own FTL feat calced by me, and the fact that these are basically a magic spell in a different form; not even an actual attack, it should be scaleable. If they can move their magic this fast for magic balls or waves that aren't even attacks, then a combat spell like a laser should at least be comparable. It's pretty nonsensical to assume combat magic is randomly slower than non-combat magic when it's purpose is to attack the foe and would thus be better suited if it were faster, not slower.
To anyone has any doubts about this: I expect an actual argument against this and not dismissing it as an assumption. We are not children who need to have our hands held and told these things outright. We can make educated guesses and assumptions within reason. "Ahem" With that out of the way, let's do the actual calc shall we? The distance to the Moon from Earth is on average 238900 miles or 384472282 meters.
384472282 / 0.8 = 480590352 m/s or 1.60303653 c Only marginally above baseline FTL, but it's still a nice little upgrade. There's also a high end I wanted to try. It got pointed out to me by CBtheDB. https://vsbattles.fandom.com/wiki/Thread:3270141#2 According to him, the tips of the spell actually dissapear into the Moon after 8 frames being fired. This is supported by the spell streaks whirlpooling into the moon at 20:31:08 like they've already hit it, meanwhile the balls of light at the end of the spell are nowhere to be seen having dissapeared into the Moon. So I'll use a timeframe of 9 frames or 0.36 seconds (I'm watching in 25 fps). 384472282 / 0.36 = 1.06797856e9 m/s or 3.56230341 c (Accepted End) Better