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May. 29th, 2018 01:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aaaaaaaagh_skyFrom Philadelphia to Boston, according to the port-finding software still found on the Bernard C. Webber's computers, was a journey of five hundred and thirty-five nautical miles. Webber's top speed was supposed to be twenty-eight knots. (Ellen wasn't aware that there was more than one kind of mile. After several attempts at explanation, the Mr. Handy they'd dubbed Ervin gave up trying to explain 'knots' and said they were 'a mile an hour plus a bit'.) Theoretically, that meant it could be as little as nineteen hours between Philly and the Commonwealth.
That, of course, relied on calm weather, experienced sailors, and fully navigable waters. The robots knew what they were doing with the boat's controls and systems, but the navigation- well, there had been a thing once called the Global Positioning Service, and apparently it didn't work any more. Something to do with an insufficient number of operational satellites. Not to mention that the Global Positioning Service was only good for saying where you were, exactly, and didn't offer any kind of information about where the seafloor was or whether there were... rocks or ... things? Reefs? Was that what they called them? (Ervin said yes, it was.) Whether there were any of those sticking out of the ocean bottom. There were probably obstacles in the same places the boat's computers said there had been two hundred years ago, but they might have moved in all that time, and who knew what had fallen out of the sky or sank to the bottom since then? Who knew what might be waiting under the surface to rip them open at full speed?
So, yeah. No thirty-miles-an-hour trip to Boston. Not even close.
Oh, they'd take it at a decent rate of speed (at least what Ervin considered a decent rate of speed for a boat), but they'd be running all the area scanners and radar and sonar and whatever else the ship had, and recording every last bit of positional data they found. And avoiding the... distressingly large... moving things under the-
HOLY GoD WHAT WAS thAT THING
(According to Ervin, 'probably some sort of mutant whale'. Ellen did not consider this to be a helpful answer.)
-well, they'd be avoiding anything that might be a whale, since the extent of the human crew's knowledge of whales could be summed up in a combination of Moby Dick and the Book of Jonah. They'd pause for the night, too, because it was just not worth it to let the robots try to navigate in the dark. They'd make the trip four times longer than it had to be.
But they'd get there, eventually.
That, of course, relied on calm weather, experienced sailors, and fully navigable waters. The robots knew what they were doing with the boat's controls and systems, but the navigation- well, there had been a thing once called the Global Positioning Service, and apparently it didn't work any more. Something to do with an insufficient number of operational satellites. Not to mention that the Global Positioning Service was only good for saying where you were, exactly, and didn't offer any kind of information about where the seafloor was or whether there were... rocks or ... things? Reefs? Was that what they called them? (Ervin said yes, it was.) Whether there were any of those sticking out of the ocean bottom. There were probably obstacles in the same places the boat's computers said there had been two hundred years ago, but they might have moved in all that time, and who knew what had fallen out of the sky or sank to the bottom since then? Who knew what might be waiting under the surface to rip them open at full speed?
So, yeah. No thirty-miles-an-hour trip to Boston. Not even close.
Oh, they'd take it at a decent rate of speed (at least what Ervin considered a decent rate of speed for a boat), but they'd be running all the area scanners and radar and sonar and whatever else the ship had, and recording every last bit of positional data they found. And avoiding the... distressingly large... moving things under the-
HOLY GoD WHAT WAS thAT THING
(According to Ervin, 'probably some sort of mutant whale'. Ellen did not consider this to be a helpful answer.)
-well, they'd be avoiding anything that might be a whale, since the extent of the human crew's knowledge of whales could be summed up in a combination of Moby Dick and the Book of Jonah. They'd pause for the night, too, because it was just not worth it to let the robots try to navigate in the dark. They'd make the trip four times longer than it had to be.
But they'd get there, eventually.