The Pacific Ocean is massive and if a ship turns off its transponder it is invisible unless you have satellites in your game. Ships can easily disappear in the Pacific even with modern search and rescues when people really really want to find a ship[ in trouble, they sometimes can’t. I have a friend that sails those waters and there are endless small islands, often uninhabited where he stays in small bays and inlets.
Nothing strange about the islands apart from him raving about the stunning beaches, waterfalls, and colorful wildlife. He once found a bale of weed, he kept it and never returned to that particular island. The strange stories he has all occurred out on the ocean. Swimming in bioluminescent water. A massive shape nearly 100m long surfaced his bow in the middle of the night and paced him for hours. It turned out to be a sub.
He has many stories about the ocean, he is convinced he saw UFOs, not necessarily aliens but definitely unidentified and very unusual crafts and he saw them go into the water. I believe him, he is not the type to be into conspiracies or make things up. He embellishes his stories a little but that is just him being a good storyteller. He was in the military and navy for 40 years so he knows the ocean well. The Pacific Ocean is an enormous space, there are military outposts but due to its size, they are few and far between. The Arctic is much much more surveilled due to all the big countries wanting a piece of it and with climate change opening the Bering Strait, this becomes very valuable. Good luck with your game, may it fare well and be profitable to you.
I think a submarine, even of a hostile country, is probably your best option for a 100m-long underwater shadow rising in front of your boat. Much better than any living creature.
Damn! Those are some amazing stories. Thanks for sharing.
There will likely be fancy sci-fi technology that would explain why the satellites can’t find the ship. Maybe a light reflecting cloak but I want to make it grounded whenever possible.
Maybe there were so many satellites that at some point two collided and caused a bunch of space debris, which makes sending up satellites incredibly difficult and satellite usage limited to mostly communication?
I dig that concept but I feel it’s starting to take away from the uniqueness of the ship and its capabilities if it’s only undetectable because of an external situation.
You could have satellite detection rely more on using another range in the electromagnetic spectrum since having enough coverage for visual detection is too difficult (think RADAR for example) with the ship providing some unique solution for it. Either like airplanes do to prevent the signals bouncing off it to begin with, or something super high-tech where it analyzes that spectrum of radiation and then calculates what the response would be if it wasn’t there.
But that might be getting into too tech-garbled territory.
How about an NPT-style treaty? The satellites got sensitive enough to detect ballistic missile submarines (or the arctic ice melted so that they can’t hide under the ice). Everyone realised that it would be catastrophic for nuclear nations not to have to worry about a retaliatory strike, so the nations made an agreement that none of them would scan the oceans with satellites.
The Pacific Ocean is massive and if a ship turns off its transponder it is invisible unless you have satellites in your game.
So it seems like the key will be some combination of deactivating the transponder, getting away from other ships, being low profile in various EM wavelengths (difficult if it's also large), traveling with a significant cloud cover (hurricane?), escaping detection by military submarines and other sonar sources, and ending up in a place and condition where they're sheltered from all of the above. This seems very nearly impossible if everyone is already hunting for our intrepid vessel, but if there's some reason for people not to be looking right away, I can imagine plausible scenarios where the data takes long enough to come together for the necessary storytelling beats to play out.
Ironically, this would be a terrible place to try and hide. Since it’s the furthest point from land, it tends to get visited by private ships pretty often, just so the people on board can say they’ve been to it.
Maybe some place off the coast of Antarctica? It’s got a very low population of researchers. You could probably find a fairly hidden bay or harbour to park in.
That’s a strong contender. Could also possibly be a gameplay mechanic with the outside of the ship being freezing and holes possibly let that cold in.
Overall I’m leaning more towards it being set in warmer waters for the sake of some elements like being able to coral dive in the surrounding waters for potential puzzle solutions.
British panel (game) shows like Would I Lie to You and 8 out or 10 Cats Does Countdown. The game element is just an excuse for funny, interesting people to crack jokes and have a good time.
QI with Stephen Fry was absolute gold! Sandi is great too. Anything with David Mitchell is awesome. I think my favorite is Johnny Vegas, that guy is a riot. Bill Baily, Phill Juputus,Sean Lock coming to think of it there wasn’t anyone on that show I didn’t love.
Pretty good. Glad that I don’t have a foreskin. No offence to people who do, but it freaks me out. Any time I watch porn and it features a penis that clearly shows foreskin I get weirded out and have to find another video.
(Don’t know if that’s something uncircumcised people can relate to going the other way around?)
Way back when I lost my virginity, the girl I was dating was like “oh nice, my last boyfriend wasn’t circumcised and he didn’t like to clean himself very well”. Made me feel good in that very nervous moment.
I had this done to me when I was 7 years old, due to some medical issues I’d had in my really young years of life. I didn’t think much of it then, just like being kinda excited about being a hospital patient. I was given a very generic/non-branded action figure as a surprise afterwards, which I named after the surgeon, who had been super nice to me. And I got some time off school.
Do we have to use such charged language? I was circumcised for a genuine medical procedure, nothing to do with hygiene, religion, or trends, so I’m very glad my parents had that done. Not so glad it had to happen in the first place, but very happy with the end result.
For software devs, I haven’t found sector to chain you nearly as much as the stack. I’ve been in Microsoft since the beginning of my career (.NET and more recently with Angular) but I’ve switched sectors from publishing, to insurance, healthcare, supply chain, education… All of those were in .NET. It probably would’ve been harder to get a job in the same sector but a different stack (Java or whatever). So… I’m glad I didn’t start in COBOL is what I’m saying. :)
‘Ghosts’ on CBS/Paramount+ is sweet, funny, lighthearted for the subject matter, and overall very enjoyable. I don’t think it will win any awards, but its a great alternative to all the dark and cynical stuff out there!
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