OK, this was weird, I had a really lucid and long and detailed dream this morning about being in the water of a Florida marina (no idea why), knowing a worldwide catastrophe meant that nearly everyone on the planet was dead or gone (no idea why or where or what). I was being dragged by tide & current out to sea and my wife was in the water too. "Ahead" of us was a superyacht (probably more a megayacht) also being dragged by tide [1] and I just about managed to swim to the rear end where the garage for toys was open with so I could climb up and use a jetski to go back and rescue wife who was struggling. Back on the yacht we were then faced with how the heck do you start this? (There was also a bit in the dream about rescuing three complete airheads from the water [2] and an orangutan (I really really have no idea...) but that's not germane to this. We did work out that there was no power throughout the ship as the generators weren't on. Presumably they would be step #1 as I'd guess that the engines might need 'starter motor' power???
*Fortunately* in the dream we eventually found a very drunken/unconscious 1st mate in his bunk who could help, but it did make me wake up thinking about these questions:
- just how do you start a megayacht - can you do it from the bridge alone? do you need someone in the engine room as well?
- presumably the electrics on board are separate generators (pretty certain about this!) - can you start *them* from the bridge?
- am I right in thinking all this would be pretty much impossible for someone totally non-skilled? Or could you work out with reasonable intelligence and some time (and maybe a manual kicking around in a locker...)
- would it be typical that such a ship would run most economically in terms of fuel usage going at, say, 1/2 speed? [3]
which doesn't answer the question at all but might be of interest to those looking to have PCs 'working passage' or just starting a job on a Free Trader.
I also managed to find this, which didn't really answer the questions either but is a rather fascinating 4 minute review of the engine room of a yacht much much smaller than my dream:
fascinating in that the guy clearly knows his stuff and enthuses about in such a way that although I don't really care about the engine room of a Hatteras 60, I found it quite engaging!
While, I'm moderately interested in the answers (not detailed engineering spec obviously, just a kind of 'overview') and I thought that TML might be the one place where there's bound to be *someone* who actually knows, it also occurred to me that this would be quite relevant to how things might equivalently work on a starship should PCs be in any kind of similiar(ish) situation. (Though maybe without the orangutan... then again, uplifts...)
Oh, and I'm pretty sure in any post-apocalyptic scenario this dream would be fairly useless as fuel and drinking water would be a hugely limiting factor. Unless of course they were obtainable from sea water. :-) That would just leave food. So a final question might be, what kind of fridge/freezer/larder capacity does a megayacht have?!
tc
[1] Would a body (i.e. human) be 'dragged' by current/tide faster or slower than a megayacht? One's lighter obviously but the other has a lot more surface area once it's going.
[2] Completely useless in terms of skills they were too - although one had a mother who was a midwife... I told you there was a weird amount of detail in this dream!