A wild new chapter appears!!!

Go purplebookhorse

10007508 Hope you like it.

10007510
Yes thanks for the chapter

10007543 You're welcome.

Thinking about it these guys are pretty much screwed.

From a navigational perspective, there really is nothing they can get a reliable fix on.

1. They don't have the basic GPS data, so the system will default to dead reckoning mode, which is wildly inaccurate and should not be relied on lest you wind up with a situation like Royal Majesty's grounding off Nantucket. RM sailed 15 NM off track in a matter of hours, Anthem at this point must have spent days on dead reckoning.
2. Since they moved ahead in time their chronometer is as good as junk, plus lacking a signal from GPS satellites they can't get a time correction to fix it either. That means they can't calculate their position based on a stellar fix, which isn't helped by the fact that even if they have a nautical almanac on board that's up to date, it's just worthless paper since they're a yearly publication. They might be able to figure out their latitude through meridian passage and polaris, but even that is a stretch.
3. Approaching land to get a position fix might be hazardous too, since years of current might have changed all the sandbanks' positions. As for landmarks ashore, lighthouses fall apart, soil erosion occurs, and landscapes change to the point where it might be insanely hard to even figure out where they are.

So yeah, even if that Italian guy on the radio (which I'd assume is VHF ch16) tells his coordinates, they can't plot an intercept maneuver since they don't know where they are anymore. Might get a better chance by switching on their EPIRB and hope its frequency is still in use so locals can home in on the VHF beacon.

To me it looks like it's more about someone finding them than it is about them finding someone.

Wonder how that's going to pan out.

10007693
They were just drifting.
Hopefully the Captain and some of the crew were taught how to use a sextant, so they can attempt to figure out how much north-south they drifted.
I don't recall if any of them have actually looked up at night and noticed the stars are 'wrong'.

10007714
They most certainly do. Knowledge of celestial navigation is a skill that is compulsory for all watchkeeping officers of any rank according to STCW conventions, and I seriously doubt watchstanders on a Royal Caribbean ship would fail to uphold such standards _{sounds more like a MSC move}. Normal procedures would have them do at least one such calculation per watch, usually to measure gyrocompass error.

The problem remains that they moved ahead in time, and as such not only are all their chronometers off kilter, they don't have a valid nautical almanac to predict the movement of celestial bodies. Even when you use relatively simple stuff like Polaris and Noon sight _{(meridian passage)}, you still need stuff like your relative angle to Aries, or the sun's declination if you want to calculate your latitude.

It might be possible to estimate stuff like the sun's declination by interpolating between the two solstices, but it would be wildly inaccurate and could induce errors of more than 1° in latitude. At best. Same goes for Polaris, mistakes without knowing Aries' angle can induce mistakes anywhere from .5 to 1.5° in latitude.

....you know, I was going to comment but after seeing the maritime remarks I feel inadequate. Still, I can hope Sam and Ashley work through this.

the fun thing about measuring the height of the sun at midday to find South, or North, depending where you ar relative to the Equator, is the midday sun moves through a figure 8 in the sky over the course of a year. And the direction the 8 points changes where you are in the world. Worse case is, you point mid day sun South mid summer, and its a Lot of degrees out when looking at the midday sun in Winter?

I think those are the solstice things?

At least they aint having to fall back to Savery Pulsejet propulsion from burning wood yet.

Well things keep getting interesting here. I hope they proceed with caution as we don't know how far forward they have been thrown. It could only have been a few decades or a thousand years. Since they had over a thousand people they probably got shoved pretty far forward.

10008899 More like 5000 people, but yeah, it could be quite a while... honestly I haven't pinned down the exact time period yet.