[OOC][PLOT] The Seventh Thread of Planning for Arc 1 - Arrivals

[robkelk]

I'm just trying to come up with a good way to wedge it in there.  (No Ever Given/Suez Canal jokes, please.    )

The thing I have about the ships showing up as part of Step 5 is that they'd be a big enough deal that we'd be all too tied up to handle Academy City right away once it does show up, emergency or not.

For one thing, there's "Where to put them?"  Labster has already figured out that LA, San Diego, and even San Fran are a no-go because of the undersea geography.  Zuikaku is among the smallest of these ships, but even that has a phenomenally huge draft of 250 meters!

Our characters would probably be all right in the middle of getting the command staff, civilian government, school administration, and student body government on each ship read-in on the situation when Academy City shows up.

Now, we can go ahead and write it like that.  This is deconstruction, and so this will present the issue of "What now?" because you can't just hide these things because they're all as tall as sky scrapers.  Not even Maginot's Surcouf because, despite it being a submarine, the old listening nets are still out there, and they'd sure as hell hear that monster of a sub and the allied navies would all fucking shit themselves.

...

Well, hang on a minute...

The challenges of ships this size are a little nuts, to be honest. Basically, with 250m or 140 fathoms below the water line, it essentially means that school ships can't be on the continental shelf. This isn't a huge challenge out in the Pacific with subduction zones all around. You can stuff a ship fairly easily into Monterey Bay, because of Monterey Canyon. You'd only need to be about a mile offshore from Point Dume in SoCal. Molokai isn't too bad, but you can't get quite as close to a place without the tectonic action or erosive turbidity of a continental river, like in California.

But well, we can't get anywhere near San Diego because of the Coronado Rise. The SF Bay shipping lanes are only swept out to 55 feet; the Golden Gate itself is deeper, but not deep enough. But the challenge here is more that the Zuikaku's deck on which Oorai sits is twice as tall as the top of the Golden Gate Bridge. The Strait of Juan de Fuca is not deep enough either. And on the East Coast, you might need to be 100 miles offshore from New Jersey in Hudson Canyon.

I'm pretty sure what happened here is that the author of Girls und Panzer took existing aircraft carriers and scaled them up until the deck was big enough to host small cities. But is that such a good idea? This has the potential to mess with views ( at 10km away, the ship is 2.4° by up to 38° across ), and since it's so much larger than a breakwater, surfing. And wildlife too.

At 250m below the surface, that means we have about 25 atmospheres of pressure on the lower decks. Good thing we have an amazing carbon coating, right? The total interior space below the surface is 690m, which means we have roughly 160 storeys of space to fill -- and probably up to 200 on the bigger school ships. This is a lot of space. But hey, the average school ship is 10 times longer than the SDF-1 Macross, because that's what we need for education, right?

BlackAeronaut has been assuring me that GnP isn't from a post-scarcity society, though. I guess it's good that our lottery dollars are enough to pay for this, right?

Actually, let me look up tsunami wavelengths.... okay good, still an order of magnitude bigger. Whew.

Source for all the depths - NOAA nautical charts

From Alvaro at MetaBall Studios, water vehicles including the Ōarai and Pravda school-ships:

https://youtu.be/ykCMsLPMca0

Hey, cool! If you want to see the school ships, you can skip to the last ten seconds, because they're the biggest things in the video. My only complaint is that Zuikaku (or Kiev) could not actually get that close to Jamaica Bay -- they'd need to be 80 Nmi further out to sea in Hudson Canyon to be in a place that could handle her immense draft.

They're simply too big to show up anywhere that they'll be seen immediately.

If they're going to show up, they're going to show up offshore where nobody's going to notice them for a few days, even if they were to show up in the shipping lanes (which doesn't need to happen). And der Film shows that at least the sensha-do teams use Morse code for long-range communication - they aren't going to swamp the airwaves with voice or picture traffic.

Malleable Continuity still takes a big hit, but nobody on Earth notices immediately. We might even have the managers be informed of the new arrivals by the celestials.


Also,

Considering that at the end of The Academy City Job we'll have over nine thousand Misaka Sisters that we have to put somewhere for a few days, I expect those apartments will end up filled ...

"Hey, Anzu, can over 9000 girls borrow Yukari's camp-out skills and your forest for a week? Just stay out of storms for a while, please."