Isilith wrote:The bigger "hand-wavium it just happens because I said so" was losing the first ironclad. Seriously would have never, ever happened... really annoyed me that he did it, especially how he did it.
1) As the books have pointed out about 1 billion times, Charisian merchantmen sailed EVERYWHERE... and have charts of EVERYWHERE that they sail... and they distributed copies of said charts every time they came back to Charis. yet the had no charts of this ONE bay. Wow... really?
2) She was leading the formation? WTF??? This really blows my mind, especially from a military historian like RFC, utter BS. She would have been in the middle of the sailing formation, nowhere near the front. So if any ship had hit the mudflat ( that they had no idea was there, for God alone knows what reason )it would have been one of the schooners or at least one of the other galleons. Absolutely ZERO chance it would have been the ironclad or one of the two bombardment ships. Those 3 would have been the center of the formation. And if they weren't, Ahbat should have been court-martialed for incompetence, not patted on the back and told it wasn't his fault.
Honestly, this annoyed me even more than "oops, forgot to light the fuse because I am an idiot" that he pulled with Dreadnought.
This whole battle scene was so forced and "made" to happen that it was annoying, and took away from the book.
I probably shouldn't say this, but in this instance you don't know what you're talking about.
First, yes, Charisian merchantmen trade almost everywhere, but that's
almost everywhere. Do you think that the British admiralty had detailed charts of every bay and harbor on the entire planet in 1800? If so, I have some bottomland I want to sell you: just don't ask me what it's on the bottom
of. Do not be thinking that
anyone on Safehold has anything
remotely like the maritime charting resources that we take for granted today. And, by the way, ships still run aground in thoroughly surveyed waters even today. Charis is still
in the early process of building up the equivalent of the British Empire's Admiralty Charts, but they are one hell of a long way away from having accomplished that yet. The fact that there are detailed geophysical maps of the of the land area of the planet
dating from the time of the "Archangels" doesn't say a thing about
current day underwater typography.
Second, this particular port is not one where blue water Charisian ships are likely to call very often, for a lot of reasons, including the fact that it makes a lot more sense for them to pick up cargoes closer to the Gulf of Dohlar. Why should they sail the extra distance when there is a lively and healthy coastal trade delivering materials transported through the canals to blue water port terminals? So, no, they didn't have a handy, up-to-date chart they could pull out for reference.
Third, you did see the bit where the Harchongese have removed all of the buoys and other navigating marks, didn't you? So even if the Charisians
had had accurate and up-to-date charts and been aware that there was a mudbank around, finding it before they hit it would have been a nontrivial challenge.
Fourth, you know absolutely nothing about the geometry of the shoal. You don't know
how much of it the ironclad actually hit or how deep the water over the rest of the shoal was. In other words, for all you know, they struck an outlying branch of a much larger shoal which any schooner or galleon in front of her (
all of whom were shallower draft than she was) might have just barely cleared.
Fifth, there's no point in the narrative which says that the ironclad was leading the formation. She was, in fact, leading her
column of the formation, which also included the bombardment ships, and that column was at or near the center of the entire formation because of signaling concerns. But sailing ships don't maintain the kind of neat formation that steam-powered vessels do. They can't, because of the vagaries of their propulsive system. Every single one of them sails slightly differently, every single one of them handles differently, and it's far more difficult to "tweak" speed up and down in a square-rigger. This is true even for sister ships built to identical plans, much less an entire squadron of ships with different hullforms, different rigs, different degrees of fouling, and about a bazillion other factors. So even the columns into which they were nominally divided were scarcely a case of "I am sailing in the wake of the ship in front of me." In fact, for pre-radar sailing vessels in the dark, maintaining any kind of
close formation is actively dangerous. A fleet of sailing ships will normally attempt to remain
in company during hours of darkness; they will
not (for all of the reasons given above) try to maintain
precise station on one another except under extraordinary circumstances.
Sixth, the galleon columns —
all of their columns, to the extent that there
were columns — were proceeded by the scouting schooners, none of whom grounded on or saw the shoal. Partly that was because of their shallower drafts, but mostly?
Mostly it was because they sailed right past it. Had they done so in
daylight, they probably would have noted the change in the water's color over the shoal and been aware of its presence; in the dark, no one was able to pick up that visual cue.
Seventh, I could give you an incredibly extensive list of ships which went aground
knowing there were shoals in the vicinity, including — but scarcely limited to — the USS
Philadelphia under the command of "Hard Luck Bill" Bainbridge when Commodore Preble was sent to "reason with" the "Pirates of Tripoli" and USS
Wisconsin in Chesapeake Bay in the 1950s. In Bainbridge's case, like the Charisians in this case, he had no reliable charts, but he did know that he was sailing into shoal water when he did it. In
Wisconsin's case, however, she took the ground despite
excellent charts and every other advantage. And, if memory serves, she did it in broad daylight.
In a sense, everything a storyteller does is "because I said so," but in this instance you seem to be getting bent out of shape over something which is utterly plausible, based on the number of times it's happened in real life history. Trust me, losing
Philadelphia in 1805 was a far greater blow to the teeny-tiny USN than losing a single
Rottweiler was to the ICN, and at the time she grounded,
Wisconsin was, I believe, the
only US battleship in commission. For that matter, the only ship-of-the-line the British lost on the American station during the American Revolution was lost because she grounded on a mudbank and couldn't be gotten off again. So don't tell me that "key ships" can't take the ground as readily as anyone else. Yes, I created a situation in which Charis lost an ironclad, but I played completely fair with the reader in the way I did it. You may not accept that, but to be perfectly honest the arguments against it which you have advanced are specious, at best.
