Elros wrote:...
Yeah Seko, I am sure that you would be able to dock into it with the key from a ship, just like you can walk into a locked building with the key in your hand. Shouldn't be too hard to program.
You'd need to be holding the key to the ship as well as the gate.
I'm not so sure it works the same, though.
You're -inside- a ship, and the goal is to manipulate a lock -outside- the ship.
That's more like trying to drag someone out of a locked room inside a building while you're standing outside the main building, than it is like walking into a locked building with a key in your inventory.
Also, the issue about communication from ship to shore is an important one; most sailors I've come across in Cantr, including my own chars that sail, have had a long and hard enough time getting the required iron and steel to build their ships.
Many can't even get their hands on navigational tools, which luckily seems to be changing currently, as a few chars of mine see more people around them manufacture more of such items and selling them to sailors.
In fact, one of my chars is looking at ways to make his town a major supplier of binoculars, telescopes and sextants.
But the materials for ship radio's are still not as widely available as needed - some islands lack materials for major components, on other islands those materials are only found in places where nobody lives and not enough people travel to.
So while it's good to be able to block out ships, there'd have to be serious thought about how to let people without radio's on their ship let it be known that they wish to dock.
One way would be to send someone in a dinghy either from the ship or from shore to clear up whether or not the people on the ship want to dock.
That would give way to a profession... "loods" in Dutch, a sort of guide to navigate incoming ships into the local waters past the shoals and sandbanks and other stuff... I think the English word for it was "pilot".
But that might go better with a fast one-person boat, which could navigate the sea at short distances.
In Cantr, the "pilot" would dock to a ship to confirm that they want to get into the locked harbour, and either sail back to shore to unlock the harbour, or remain on the larger ship with a key so they can enter the harbour.
Or to prevent pirates from killing the pilot and grabbing the key, perhaps instead of an actual key, it could be implemented that a locked port requires a code?
Either at random or chosen by who makes the locked gate, it wouldn't be too smart to kill the pilot if the code for the harbour was in his head.
Of course, if he or she falls asleep, the town would be screwed if ships were locked in.
So we'd need a project to "break the code" or something, which would last two days for example, and can only be done by one or two people from inside the harbour, and has a random chance of success.
And when successfully completed, the project initiator would be able to either set a new code or see a new code.
Which means the initiator would have to be there working on the project when it's completed.
Hm... I'm sure more thought than that goes into it but my mind isn't up for it right now.
hmmmmm beer.... pizza.... computers.... women... stir-fried furry little critters...
