Tuesday 23 June 2015

Travel Time in Horn of the Kraken



            Are we there yet? Travel time is always a little hard to estimate in fiction. Yes there are average speeds for ship types and horses, but you also have to account for what I like to call “The Little Deuce Coup” phoneme. Some times a ship, a horse, or what have you, will just be fast. Look at the Blue Nose of Grand Bank’s fame. Other times a vessel is a lemon. There is also terrain, weather, wind in particular for a sailing vessel, the skill of the crew, a host of factors. For Horn of the Kraken I shaved a bit off the average speed of a long ship in the game and used that as an average. Sometime with a ruler and an atlas gave me approximate travel times then I gave myself about ten percent leeway to make the times fit the story line. This gave me a fairly reasonable rate of travel, so long as I remembered to slow them down for every time I sped them up.
            Having been through a north Atlantic storm in a modern vessel I have to say, I wouldn’t want to try it in a long ship. The Norse seamen were tough!

www.drivethrufiction.com/product/151000/Horn-of-the-Kraken  

http://www.amazon.com/Stephen-B.-Pearl/e/B00FEOLLIC 

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