A plot hole
20 February 2018 12:18 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
igenlodeUnfortunately I've created a problem for myself in specifying first of all that the Requin made port at Stavanger (in order to allow Erik to reach Christine by land without having to cross the mountains) and then that Erik simply allowed his self-destruct device to detonate unattended, rather than deliberately acting to sabotage the ship -- neither of which details were included in the original plot summary! The result is that the shipwreck must presumably have taken place at a fairly low latitude and not that far off the coast of Norway; I don't know how often Erik would have planned to reset his fail-safe, but since it was intended to detonate and avenge him if he were detected, probably not less than once every twenty-four hours. I can't really imagine someone allowing three or four days to pass before his revenge, with the chance of the device itself being detected and disabled during that period...
But then I can't really imagine that Erik would have allowed Raoul to have sailed out of port safely for several days before being disposed of, either, under the old scheme. He couldn't possibly be certain that Raoul wouldn't find some means of abandoning ship and/or persuading the captain to turn back, once he discovered what had happened (and Erik had taken steps to make very sure than Raoul would discover what had happened and would suffer from the knowledge!)
All of which means that we have to explain why on earth Raoul's band of survivors didn't simply make their way back to the nearest land which they had just left, instead of heading off up into the Arctic. Spitsbergen is thirteen hundred miles from Stavanger, and that was pretty well known already -- presumably an exploring party would have been landed further north, even if we've already hypothesised that they weren't actually going for a Polar dash but were just mapping and collecting specimens. Even Shackleton's voyage was only eight hundred miles, and that took them a couple of weeks pushing as hard as they could go. Besides, how can Raoul end up making such a colossal mistake as to head off in totally the wrong direction to find help? :-(
Even if we assume that they have no means of propulsion or navigation due to the circumstances of the wreck and hence cannot navigate back to Norway, and that the winds at the time drive them north and continually offshore, how can they possibly drift that sort of distance in a relatively short time and/or survive? Supposing that Raoul gets his navigation totally wrong (due to the weather being so bad that he cannot get an accurate sight? But surely he wouldn't mistake south for north: he still has sunrise to go by) and they actively set sail in the wrong direction, the distance would still be ridiculous for a small-boat voyage, let alone one made by accident. It took a couple of weeks for Robin Knox-Johnston to sail from Cornwall to Madeira on his round-the-world race, which is only about half the distance; a wallowing lifeboat would take much longer than that.
I think this was an existing plot-hole in the original (where I vaguely thought 'they drift around for a few days, then sight land to the north' without considering times/distances), but it has now been amplified by pinning the location down to a port well south of the Arctic Circle :-(
So do I need to do a major plot rewrite along the lines of having Raoul already have been at the front and come home on leave, in place of awaiting a delayed call-up? If so, I currently have no idea at all how I get my shipwrecked sailors into a position of mutual rescue with the d'Artois Expedition....
But then I can't really imagine that Erik would have allowed Raoul to have sailed out of port safely for several days before being disposed of, either, under the old scheme. He couldn't possibly be certain that Raoul wouldn't find some means of abandoning ship and/or persuading the captain to turn back, once he discovered what had happened (and Erik had taken steps to make very sure than Raoul would discover what had happened and would suffer from the knowledge!)
All of which means that we have to explain why on earth Raoul's band of survivors didn't simply make their way back to the nearest land which they had just left, instead of heading off up into the Arctic. Spitsbergen is thirteen hundred miles from Stavanger, and that was pretty well known already -- presumably an exploring party would have been landed further north, even if we've already hypothesised that they weren't actually going for a Polar dash but were just mapping and collecting specimens. Even Shackleton's voyage was only eight hundred miles, and that took them a couple of weeks pushing as hard as they could go. Besides, how can Raoul end up making such a colossal mistake as to head off in totally the wrong direction to find help? :-(
Even if we assume that they have no means of propulsion or navigation due to the circumstances of the wreck and hence cannot navigate back to Norway, and that the winds at the time drive them north and continually offshore, how can they possibly drift that sort of distance in a relatively short time and/or survive? Supposing that Raoul gets his navigation totally wrong (due to the weather being so bad that he cannot get an accurate sight? But surely he wouldn't mistake south for north: he still has sunrise to go by) and they actively set sail in the wrong direction, the distance would still be ridiculous for a small-boat voyage, let alone one made by accident. It took a couple of weeks for Robin Knox-Johnston to sail from Cornwall to Madeira on his round-the-world race, which is only about half the distance; a wallowing lifeboat would take much longer than that.
I think this was an existing plot-hole in the original (where I vaguely thought 'they drift around for a few days, then sight land to the north' without considering times/distances), but it has now been amplified by pinning the location down to a port well south of the Arctic Circle :-(
So do I need to do a major plot rewrite along the lines of having Raoul already have been at the front and come home on leave, in place of awaiting a delayed call-up? If so, I currently have no idea at all how I get my shipwrecked sailors into a position of mutual rescue with the d'Artois Expedition....
