Cruise ship question

For my NaNo project, the backstory is that a cruise ship like the Celebrity Solstice once set off, traveled into a stretch of unexpected fog and emerged in another world*. It has to be a ship capable of carrying at least a few thousand or so people.

My question is, about how long could the ship keep traveling until land is sighted? The crew realizes quickly that there's nothing but dead air on the radio, they can't really navigate (no constellations) and the port they set out from has disappeared. So they could start rationing food supplies. But what I need is enough time for them to get desperate, so that when land is finally sighted, nearly everyone's ready to drop anchor and go ashore even if that land looks (and is) deserted.

At the same time, though, the ship can't run out of fuel entirely, because I want the people to split up: some staying on the land while others eventually leave on the ship. So what would be a reasonable-yet-very-unnerving length of time between the fog bank and the land sighting?

Thanks in advance for any help.

*Editing this to add : It's another world entirely. It's not Earth, so our geography doesn't apply and there are no satellites or even familiar constellations that they could use for navigation.

So the location of the land they sight is entirely up to me. The land can be a fortnight or months away from their original location, depending on how long such a ship could reasonably travel without draining its fuel (and without running out of fresh water, though I imagine they could set up solar stills).

waylander said:

All modern ships have sat nav and beacons so you need to factor that in.

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They're in another world now, a world where there have never been any humans. I don't think satellite navigation would be possible under those circumstances, unless I misunderstand something.

They sail into another world, so the geography of this one doesn't really matter, I'm afraid.

What I'd really like to know is, how long could such a cruise ship go before its fuel starts to be a concern, which might make the crew and passengers desperate to sight land? A week? A month?

Thanks, Ultragotha, that helped a lot.

Looks like after ten days, they'd be close to exhausting the fuel reserves, and it would even more unnerving if, during that time, there was no communication, no sign of anything except miles of water all around, and every indication that this wasn't Earth. Ten days doesn't seem too long, but after reading some of the stats in the sites you linked to, I see why fuel would run out so fast, even if they had solar panels to generate some electricity.

Magnanimoe said:

If there's no way to know which direction they're heading, would a ship's captain keep going? Would he try to turn back, or sit tight for awhile before deciding to search for land out of desperation?

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I think he'd turn back, especially when communications failed, but when he couldn't find the port they'd left just a day ago, he might buckle down to wait.

Even then, though, they'd be consuming food and water. And eventually he'd have to keep moving, just because there would be no other option other than waiting (which hasn't accomplished anything so far).

This is all backstory, though - it's literally one line in an "origins story" that the now-middle-aged great-granddaughter of the ship's first officer tells a teenager. What's been passed down through the generations are mostly the bare bones of the story - ship sails through fog, emerges on another world and searches for some time before finding a place to land. I just needed to have that "some time" clarified.

Mr Flibble said:

You can probably make a case for anywhere between a week and a fortnight or maybe even longer tbh. How long would you like it to be?

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Oh, the exact length doesn't matter to me as long as it uses up most of the ship's fuel. If you guys had shown me that most cruise ships travel for three months, I'd have had them sailing for nine or ten weeks before they spotted land. Since it's more like "carry enough fuel for 10 to 14 days", they sight land after ten days.

They just need to see the land at a point when they'd be concerned about the fuel supplies (so they're prepared to go ashore), but they can't have the fuel supplies completely exhausted (so the ship eventually leaves, and the landbound people now have no idea if the shipbound ones all died out at sea or found their way back to our world, yet couldn't return for them).

frimble3 said:

I think that the big problem wouldn't be fuel or food. It's going to be the reaction among a thousand passengers who realize that things have gone very, very wrong.

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Yeah, can you imagine?

I needed a large number of people on board because otherwise their descendants might become somewhat inbred after 98 years when the story begins. But that does mean a lot of people who signed up for a pleasure cruise are suddenly thrown into a nightmare. I can see the crew having a hell of a problem on their hands, especially if some of the passengers blame them for getting the ship lost.

frimble3 said:

Oh, please, as the food runs short, have someone suggest eating a couple of passengers! Even if there's still some food left!

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Maybe the passengers who complain the most.

Read this once in a SF story set on a suspended-animation colonist ship. The crew were the only ones awake when the navigation? failed, and the ship was lost in some inter-dimensional void. Supplies ran short and gradually, the frozen passengers started to vanish. The POV character was a young crewman who developed a fondness for a young woman among the passengers, used to visit her 'container' just to look at her. One day, she wasn't there.

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Heck, that would make a great story in and of itself, never mind backstory for the fantasy romance I'm working on.

jclarkdawe said:

I realize this is fantasy, but this has been bugging me.

The captain is in the middle of the ocean with no navigational aids. There's no chance he keeps a consistent course. Current and wind will cause him to change course without him realizing it. People who are shipwrecked with no navigational aids tend to die as they float around in the ocean and there's a simple reason why this happens.

All planets are going to have some consistent traits. Currents are one of them. Broadly speaking, each ocean moves in a circular fashion. Result is debris tends to move to the center of the ocean. Boats will tend to follow the currents. More likely than not, your cruise ship will never hit land, but go in a gradual arc until it stops, miles from land.

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I can always count on you for detailed, realistic aspects of sailing that don't just make the stories more interesting but are easy for me to understand as well.

This story begins nearly a hundred years since they made landfall, but if I revisit the journey in a sequel/prequel, I'll keep that in mind. Especially the part about going east or west. And yes, the world will have magnetic poles.

There can also be some speculation that the land found them, rather than them finding the land, because the premise of the story isn't just that they're lost in another world and find land. It's that there's something extremely powerful and hostile already living there.

PrincessOfCats said:

You might try to hunt up articles and interviews on that disaster to get an idea of how people might react.

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Thank you!

Thanks for asking, Megann. I finished it today. It was my NaNo project and clocked in at 47.5 K words, so... almost made the word count!

An AW member volunteered to beta, but I'm keeping you in mind if I write something set on the cruise ship. I find ships of any kind fascinating.