bravenewworld | (no subject)

This is a notice that I'm suspending normal trips to the islands. The waves are getting too big and I'm seeing whirlpools forming. There's also been some minor damage to the port, and I wouldn't suggest anyone spend too much time near the shore at this point. For anyone who booked a trip, you'll be contacted first once things are back to normal.

That said, I'm pretty sure this ain't normal weather for this time of year. If anyone's up for trying to find a likely source for this problem, I'm more than willing to provide the transportation. Just, if you get motion sick easily or can't swim? Sit this one out.

Oh and one more thing: I've agreed to let Rangers assigned to monitor the situation use the port's tower for observation and the port as a base camp. I've cleared space in my workshop. Just don't touch anything.

Banzu out.

[Action for shore-watching Rangers or anyone braving the coast]

[Exactly how much arm-twisting was involved in this agreement is unclear (it wasn't much - this is to his benefit too), but as promised there's space in the workshop, with a folding table and chairs set up for meetings and maps, some tents pitched indoors with cots, and a lit brazier to both chase away the winter and to help dry anyone who got soaked by sea spray. The port did sustain some damage - the external drydock doors are cracked and no longer providing full protection to the interior, the shoreline has retreated noticeably, and the final few posts in the palisade are either missing or tilted over the water - but so far this hasn't affected its use. Banzu's mostly retreated to his upstairs apartment and transferred most of his Pokémon back to Union, but he does occasionally come to get something from a workbench or go up to the tower to take a look himself.

For more details on the port, see here.

Note: This is not the main event post, this is just in case anyone wants to investigate the ocean ahead of time.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I'm going ruin-crawling with a couple of girlfriends, but you keep an eye on the ocean for me, would you? I'm rather fond of it.

I have a vested interest in it myself.

...If this doesn't last too much longer things should be okay. Gonna have to make some repairs, re-dredge the approach to the drydock, and get cracking on reinforcing the shoreline as it is, but other than that this is just a major annoyance right now. If this goes on for too long though, I'm going to at least lose the drydock.

That sounds like a lot of work as-is. And without that drydock, there's no new ships, right?

It's not as much work as completely rebuilding, but it's still going to be a bit time-consuming.

At this point, it hasn't been looking like any more will be built anytime soon anyways. I've got the plans for two more ships drawn up, and I've been kicking around ideas for two more, but the demand for rides has roughly been where I can handle it with one ship, though a second one wouldn't hurt. In general though? Yeah, it's the drydock or nothing, as far as I'm concerned. I looked at some other ideas when I was planning the port and while the runner-up wouldn't require a drydock to build or launch a ship, if anything went wrong the ship would snap in half while being launched. I went with the sure thing.

Well now you're going to have to explain that rejected idea to me. It sounds either exciting or incredibly stupid.

Mm. Basically, you'd build the ship on shore at the top of a ramp, stern facing the water. Once it was finished you'd grease the ramp and then push the ship and let it slide into the water. It seems simple enough, but when I did some math I kept getting some really big numbers for how much stress would be on the hull during the launch, way more than it'd ever see in normal use. I'd either have to really overbuild the ship to handle it, or hope that I got every detail of the launch perfect. Since there wasn't anyone I could talk to about the details and all I had to work from were a few books, most of them fiction that wasn't interested in being perfectly accurate, the drydock idea seemed safest for popping my ship-launching-cheri. More work to build initially, but now I can also use it if I need to do maintenance on the hull at some point, so long-term it probably works out better this way.

Mm, yeah, we used things like that all the time for smaller boats in the Archipelago, but something as big and heavy as your bucket, that kind of impact might crack the keel.

[For possibly the first time Banzu's seen, she looks completely serious. Ships are Very Important.]

Of course, for maintenance, down there there's always a handy beach you can just drag the ship up on.

[Ooh, serious Isabela, this is new. He nods.]

That's what I was worried about. The weight of the engine is the problem. I doubt I could pull it onto a beach, even with my Golurk pulling. A ship the same size without all that metal you could probably do it with, but not Pathfinder.

See, even before I knew how your ship worked, I called it. Sails are a lot more practical to maintain.

I will concede her the speed edge, though. It's all tradeoffs.