as far as I know, there is no large carnivore who would abandon actively eating a killed meal to chase live prey. chasing and hunting live prey is a risk, as a healthy live creature has the capability to injure a carnivore, or tire it out through the chase. If there is, say, a giant pile of dead bodies to eat, which abandoning would allow other carnivores or scavengers to steal and eat instead, it makes no sense at all.
please stop doing that thing
The sole exception I can think of is if the large carnivore thought the live prey was another carnivore or scavenger, and was chasing them as a threat display to ensure they didn’t steal the dead bodies. Even in that case, though, it would only be a short, mock charge followed by returning to the pile if the opponent fled. With possibly whatever the animal’s equivalent of “and stay out” would be.
Another thing: most carnivores don’t like to fight. They have to mug something to death for every single meal, they have to stay in top shape while conserving their energy. Meanwhile, herbivores have plenty of extra energy because they eat stuff that comes out of the ground and doesn’t fight back, and they often live in big social groups, so they’re better at handling stress and more used to having to actually come to blows with other animals to get their way.
So like, a zebra will try kick your ass just to see what’s up. A tiger won’t do shit unless it’s damn sure it can take you. I’d rather come face to face with a cougar than a stag— have you seen videos of what happens to hunters when a stag catches a dude on the ground? the stag tears the dude apart. Not even to eat him. Just because the stag didn’t like what was going on and decided it was time to curb stomp a motherfucker.
So if you’re deciding what kind of Big Scary Animals to have be a threat, like, forget wolves and lions and eagles and velociraptors. Go drop in a moose.
This is why loud noise can scare bears away. It’s a threat display that normally convinces them that the charge isn’t worth the effort.
-Exception:
If a carnivore is Not That Hungry it might drop something dead to chase something that is doing Extreme Prey Behavior– but it’s not going to be serious about it. I’m thinking of things like a domestic cat that chases birds and mice for kicks. Honestly, I think that the t rex in Jurassic Park was a good example of predator behavior– she abandons something difficult (like the kids in the jeep) for the bright shiny thing she has been conditioned to understand means food (tightpants math guy with the flare + gruff dino man with flare). For the rest of the film, she chases things that run, and then quits and chows down once she has something. This has been one of my biggest beefs with the later JP films, especially Jurassic World– rather than the scares coming from being treated and stalked like prey by animals, the scares are based on monsters killing and eating randomly. (And what’s with the treatment of all the herbivores as good and gentle? Herbivores will fuck you up because they got scared or because you pissed them off and those are the two primary emotions of large herbivores– they won’t eat you, but they’ll still trample you).
+Addition:
The predators that aren’t snipers (like cougars or herons) tend to test individuals in a herd– they want to gauge your health and willingness to fuck somebody up before they commit to you as a target. If you stare them down with your cold dead eyes and gear up to wreck their shit they’ll piss off unless they’re completely desperate. (Like I said, the main emotions of prey animals are Time To Fuck Shit Up and Time To Run). So, I’m desperately tired of all these people running and screaming away from wolves and velociraptors and bears oh my.
Consider:
How much scarier fiction could be if predators acted like actual predators that can be intelligent and patient and are pressing around the edges of your party to find weakness and fear.
Ever gone back and read the original Jurassic Park book? Please don’t, fuckin’ awful I couldn’t even finish it for various reason but the predator behavior like this was a BIG problem. I got so angry at it…haha.
In many situations you’d be more likely to get chased and damaged by a herbivore feeling threatened than a predator already feeding (though push your luck there and see what happens…)
My favourite example of the “herbivores are harmless” fallacy is the
Cape Buffalo. If they’re unhappy about the presence of something that upsets them, they’ll make it go away…
…and if the
something-that-upsets-them
can’t run away fast enough (people, for one) then its going-away can be messy and permanent.
Someone (I think it was writer Robert Ruark) once described Cape Buffalo as “looking at you as if you owe them money.”
This lot all know you owe them money…
…but the big guy on the left knows how much, and that your repayment is late.
Important thing to point out about travel by foot or horseback: if you’re traveling over mountains, you can basically cut those distances in half on a clean trail, and in thirds or quarters on a trail you have to blaze yourself. Although someone who’s been in the mountains for months or years may be able to travel at the paces listed above for several days at a clip. (For instance, it’s not uncommon for an Appalachian Trail thru-hiker, carrying about 30 pounds, to do 20 or even sometimes 25 miles a day, six days a week, once they’ve had enough time out there to build up into an endurance athlete.)
YES. This whole thread is the best thing and betterbemeta’s tags (above) are on point. I would love actual ‘realistic ancient battles’ where like ten actual fighters and whatever serfs they can persuade to accompany them posture and try to intimidate each other, or have an Official Scrum on a mutually beneficial day. That and just…cattle raiding.
I guess in post-collapse terms it’s theoretically different because your whole raider gang exists to nick other people’s shit so doesn’t need to cultivate or craft much except perhaps to make them more self-sufficient in weaponry, armaments, and other logistical things that’ll enable them to raid harder and more often. That’s exactly why, on the other side of things, as many citizen’s as possible in your vulnerable good-guy farming commune might need to be militia members to protect themselves from people who can dedicate their full-time everyday energy to Being Raiders.
I say in theory because, even if you’re nicking other people’s shit, why not treat that as a bonus? Why not look to history’s peoples who placed a particular import on raiding as a way of life, and notice that none of them were just straight-up predators. They had enough agricultural or pastoral or pescatoral (is that a word?) infrastructure to subsist, and then the luxury, the surplus, came from attacking other people part-time, very occasionally. Look at norse folks going viking; look at the invasive pastoralists of the Eurasian steppe. Just in terms of the caloric requirements and risks inherent in combat, you’re not gonna want to do that full-time. Training to do it well will take more calories and they need to come from somewhere. You pick your battles. You take without fighting at all where you can – so intimidation and making enemies surrender without having to fight is important here; c.f. pirates of the Golden Age – and you fight rarely and only when you know you can a) win, b) benefit hugely from it.
I’m no historic or economic expert so I could be wrong on several aspects but know this, a army is EXPENSIVE, and a standing professional one that most people tend to think of in fantasy settings or just at all is obscenely so.
Not only do you require a lot of hard currency to pay for these soldiers, you also need to pay for equipment, supplies, training, and so forth.
And this is without going into the fact you’re going to need a bureaucracy to help get this all in order with is ANOTHER whole mess to get into that is also gonna require it’s own funding and manpower and infrastructure to maintain and operate.
There’s a reason most medieval battles involved poorly trained random ass peasants being given some basic weaponry (if even that) who’s pay was basically “whatever you can loot off the dead and defeated.” because that was typically all the random lord or noble of the day could seriously afford.
Heck and when actual mercenaries were involved they tended to settle fights and battles by just negotiating certain terms and then calling it a day without firing a arrow or so much as lifting a weapon.
The Romans had more actual legit battles and war than the medieval period BECAUSE they had an advanced enough bureaucracy, infrastructure (IE roads aqueducts, forts etc.), government, and economy to be able to maintain and fund a standing professional army/military force.
It wasn’t until the early modern era (roughly 1700′s I think) when governments in europe had even centralized and advanced enough to be able to maintain a professional military.
Unless in your world you get milk from a “milk-beast” you don’t put people to sleep with “sleep-weed.” There are dozens of real plants that actually put people to sleep: Lemon balm Valerian Passion Flower Chamomile Poppy Lavender Catnip Hops Rooibos Skullcap Virgin’s bower Lady’s slipper Feverfew Motherwort Bee-balm bergamot perilla figwort I found them after 0.35 seconds of googling.
(herbologists out there: I know there are probably some mistakes there. Feel free to correct me)
On one hand, yeah, I get it that it’s nice to learn about something real in fantasy books.
But on the other hand…I am NEVER going to throw real herbs into my stories. Not unless I know it’ll be near-impossible for a child to overdose. Not unless I know I can take time (without an editor removing it) to explain how to safely prepare these tisanes.
Food preparations are one of the most easily made “fan creations” you can have rise out of a book series, since everyone has food on hand or can run out to a store to buy it, or go outside to try to forage it (if they see the internet says they have it living wild in their area). And you really, REALLY don’t want to accidentally lead someone who is young, or who just doesn’t know shit about cooking or chemistry or foraging, down a path where they poison themselves trying to make something. And that’s not even touching on foraging and “false friends”, where a plant might look one way in your area and be safe to eat, but might be poisonous elsewhere in the world where a similar-looking plant is found. There’s a mushroom in the united states that looks similar to an edible variety in Asia. As I understand it, a lot of poisonings occur among immigrants to the US from the region that has the friendly, edible type of mushrooms because they think the US variety is just as safe to eat, and it’s not. I would hate, hate, hate to set up a situation like that as an author, by assuming that a friendly, edible plant in my backyard doesn’t have false-friends elsewhere in the world.
J. K. Rowling handled this by making her potion ingredients fake or improbable to use. She could have had Snape talking about deadly nightshade, but he’s introduced talking about bezoars. Bezoars are from an animal’s stomach–hard to get, and gross.
Patrick Rothfuss handled it by making sure the dangers of fucking chemistry up were very firmly highlighted.
Unless I have a lot of time and place to safely explain how to use a plant, I’m absolutely going to go the “safe” route (”cheap” route to some of you) of using made-up herbs. I’d rather people be irritated with me being cheap or having weak worldbuilding than finding out some reader went and made themselves ill or dead because they trusted that information from my work was complete or correct.
Sure, some or all of those in the list above might be perfectly safe with no poison lookalikes around. I drink Rooibos tea myself–although I’ve never gotten sleepy from it.
But I’m just not educated enough about plants–even after having lurked on several sites online for months–to take a chance in my writing, since it’s just not me that’ll be taking a chance, but possibly readers who assume I know what the fuck I’m talking about. (When I might not!)
A very interesting response. I admit I hadn’t thought of the dangers of realistic herbology, but you’re right, especially for children’s books.
I think there’s a more elegant solution than just making up a name, though. Say “a certain herb” rather than the specific plant’s name and you’re fine. Or smudge the details.
Steven King does something similar with the crimes in his book—describing hotwiring a car in great detail but getting some things intentionally wrong so you can’t go out and do it.
In the vein of ladydomini’s response, I’d favor made-up herb names for an additional medical reason - even if something is super-safe or fairly benign in terms of side effect profiles, people generally don’t take these things in a vacuum, and you can never, ever cover drug-herb interactions in a fantasy world. (You can’t stop and say “Aeryn used St. John’s wort to help her mood, but wouldn’t have if she’d been on SSRIs like Prozac because of the risk of serotonin syndrome, or if she was on birth control, certain HIV meds, transplant drugs…”)
But there’s a second reason why you might choose to make up names, and that’s etymology. (It’s also why I picked St. John’s wort instead of going with one of the above herbs.) Because if you’re in a fantasy world where there are neither saints nor dudes named John, St. John’s wort doesn’t make a lot of sense to name-check, and referring to hypericum perforatum wouldn’t be any better. That’s not going to come up as *much,* but it’s definitely another reason.
(A third might be that you want an herb that has fantasy-world properties - something that doesn’t exist in the real world. Granted, you could randomly say valerian has magic-nullifying powers, but you might want magical plants for a magical reason - or maybe you want a plant with a pharmacological profile that doesn’t exist in the real world. I’m thinking here of ASOIAF’s moon tea and the tansy plant - it’s apparently both a very effective contraceptive and an abortifacient.)
So, yeah, this aspect of fantasy has never bothered me - I’d be more bothered by seeing real-world herbs incorrectly used, especially given the potential for RL trouble. (I guess whether you’d want your healers to be super non-specific or to say “I used tansy and athelas” is a matter of preference at that point; given the abundance of made-up names in the rest of fantasy, made-up herbs don’t bother me.)
Given how many times I read stories like that as a kid and tried to recreate ‘potions’ in the backyard….yeah I’m glad a lot of them were made-up names because me being a clever kid, I would have gone looking. Especially if I’d had the internet. Unless it’s like a practical, safe, real-world use (like “Annie put aloe leaves on her burn to help it heal” or “Margaret drank ginger and hibiscus tea to help her get over a cold”), I’d not include it. Made-up herbs work nicely and less chance of too-clever kids getting Ideas that could be a problem later.
Hell, the side effects make this a valid concern even with ‘harmless’ innocent ones. Did you know for instance that only SOME hibiscus flowers are edible for humans? Or that parts of Dandelion or Aloe if consumed can be a diuretic – which can be dangerous if one is dehydrated? Even aspirin (or ‘willow bark’ if we’re going with old-school herbs) can be dangerous to the wrong person – it happens to be a blood thinner, which is sometimes good if you are having a heart attack, but not so good (i.e. potentially dangerous) if you are menstruating, hemophiliac, bleeding or anemic.
I’d actually urge similar caution with crystals and rocks btw; some stones cannot be safely exposed to sweaty skin or water or heat or what not, because they produce unsafe chemical reactions under the wrong circumstances.
as a former dumbass kid that had to be stopped from drinking poison nettle tea after reading a YA wiccan flavored book,
please. Use fake names of plants.
This is the kind of thing I would never even have thought of, but it’s a really interesting and valid concern.
i have indeed thought of it, and would like to propose a solution to satisfy both parties:
use made up plants, but put some effort into designing them.
don’t call it ‘sleep-weed’, call it ‘slugbane’ or ‘ketterling’s false poppy’ or ‘somniflora’ or ‘purple fretleaf’. give it a name that sounds like a real plant name. problem fucking solved.
@betterbemeta are you able to translate this? Is it true horses can see netherbeings?? Will we ever know the extent of their powers???
I think I have reblogged this before but I’ll answer it again bc its a fascinating answer I feel and i was more funny than informational last time.
The truth is that horses see what they think are nether beings, I guess. They have a perfect storm of sensory perception that, useful for prey beings, marks false positives on mortal danger all the time. Which is advantageous to a flight-based prey species: running from danger when you’re super fast is much ‘cheaper’ than fighting, so you waste almost nothing from running from a threat that’s not there. Versus, you blow everything if you don’t see a threat that is there.
Horses also have their eyes positioned on the sides of their heads, which gives them an incredible range of peripheral vision almost around their entire body with only a few blind spots you can sneak up on them in. But this comes at the cost of binocular vision; they can only judge distance for things straight ahead of them. Super useful for preventing predators sneaking up from the sides or behind, but useless for recognizing familiar shapes with the precision we can.
Basically we now have a walking couch with anxiety its going to get attacked at any second, that can see almost everything, but mostly only out of the corner of its eye. It has a few blind spots and anything that suddenly appears out of them is terrifying to it. Combine that with that it actually has far superior low-light vision than us, and that its ears can swivel in any directions like radar dishes, and you’ve basically given a nervous wreck a highly accurate but imprecise danger-dar.
To be concise: all horses, even the most chill horses, on some level believe they are living in a survival horror.
This means that you could approach it in a flapping poncho and if it can’t recognize your shape as human, they mistake you for SATAN… or you could pass this one broken down tractor you’ve passed 100 times on a trail ride, but today is the day it will ATTACK… or your horse could feel a horsefly bite from its blind spot and MAMA, I’VE BEEN HIT!!!… or you could both approach a fallen log in the woods but in the low light your horse is going to see the tree rings as THE EYE OF MORDOR.
However, they actually have kind of a cool compensation for this– they are social animals, and instinctively look towards leadership. In the wild or out at pasture, this is their most willful, pushy, decisive leader horse who decides where to go and where it’s safe. But humans often take this role both as riders and on the ground. They are always watching and feeling for human reactions to things. This is why moving in a calm, decisive way and always giving clear commands is key to working with this kind of animal. Confusing commands, screaming, panic, visible distress, and chaos will signal to a horse that you, brave leader are freaked out… so it should freak out too!
On one hand, you’ll get horses that will decide that they are the leader and you are not, so getting them to listen to you can be tough– requiring patience and skill more than force. On the other hand, a good enough rider and a well-trained horse (or a horse with specialized training) can venture into dangerous situations, loud and scary environments, etc. calmly and confidently.
The joke in OP though is that many horses that are bred to be very fast, like thoroughbreds, are also bred and encouraged to be high-energy and highstrung. Making them more anxious and prone to seeing those ‘demons.’ All horses in a sense are going to be your anxious friend, but racehorses and polo ponies and other sport horses can sometimes be your anxious friend that thinks they live in Silent Hill.
Reblogging some horse knowledge for certain people who write fantasy books but know nothing about horses *cough cough*
Oh hey bc I’m sick and I don’t see this around a lot, let’s talk boarding school AUs! Because yeah, college AUs are good start, but there’s a few fun details that make boarding schools stand out:
First of all, everything you read in fanfic about situational gayness is true. I’m serious. When you’re set up to live, work, and play at school (and usually with strict controls preventing you from leaving campus) you start to seek affection wherever you can find it. One of the reasons I didn’t realize I was bi for years was how completely normal it was for people to cuddle regardless of gender or sexual preference. Packs of completely straight-identified dudes and even dating het couples would curl up and do homework on the regular. Imagine how confusing it would be for your OTP if they first met bc they were cuddling in a puppy pile along with tons of other potential partners.
Not all boarding schools are for the rich. Some are reform schools. Some are organized around a specific topic, like science or the arts. Some exist simply because students are spread out too far to commute back and forth. My school was sponsored by the government, so the most I had to do was pay for supplies and a train ticket up there once a quarter. (Yes, just like Hogwarts.)
The true enemy is the staff. Not that bullying doesn’t still exist, but when you live together 24/7, a funny thing happens. You might not always like each other, but you quickly start to realize you have a common enemy - the adults in charge of this zoo. And when you have a common enemy, it’s easier to get along. 99% of our teenage spite was redirected from each other to the security guards who prevented us from innocently taking each other’s clothes off in the bushes, which meant we didn’t beat the shit out of each other so much.
Related, everyone becomes an exhibitionist. Similar to the confusing lines around being gay/straight/whatever, when you’re trapped at school you have no place to go to get it on. So when people do become involved, they either have to find a super secret hiding place (like a jammed elevator) or get used to banging next to three or four other couples at the one makeout spot with low visibility. (Which may change weekly, given the aforementioned staff. I remember one time watching a lazy security guard mount a giant headlight assembly on a pole, stand back, and sweep the high beam back and forth over a hillside. Half-naked couples scattered like rabbits.)
You will probably almost kill yourselves once a semester, but it will be okay as long as no one notices. Unless you’re at one of the mythical rich kid schools where idk, everyone has their own helicopter, you pretty much have to invent your own fun. My school had restrictions around tvs and video games because blah blah “being healthy”, so we also spent a lot of time outside trying to figure out what the fuck to do. Protip to staff: this is actually way less healthy than video games and computers, because bored teens can and will fucking destroy themselves by accident. Example: one trend we came up with was human versions of all board games, not just chess. This sounds kind of adorable and innocent, until the incident where we attempted Human Jenga. Protip to everyone else: DO NOT PLAY HUMAN JENGA. Even if you’re being very careful about stacking people, eventually the sheer weight of the stack will start to smother the people down below even if you thought their chest was clear. And if they can’t breathe, they can’t let you know they are dying. We almost lost the bottom row over that. (No staff ever found out.)
Prank wars are real, and they get out of hand. Again, when well-meaning adults force you to make your own fun: fun is prone to escalate. Food fights become whole dorm events; nerds get revenge by fucking with goddamn everyone. One time some friends and I got access to a guy’s computer, put a back door in it, took control of his machine remotely and convinced him he’d created an emergent AI. Another time I got line of sight to a window in a rival dorm and took down their computer every time someone started a paper. In retrospect these are all extremely dick moves but uh I was not always aligned good in high school.
That’s all I can think of for now - go forward and sin with pride!
You learn how to sneak around really well….
Shit yeah that is also true
My roommate had a boyfriend who learned how to climb gutter pipes for illicit visits at night
Also we played Assassins a lot on campus which required both stealth and intense paranoid
You were assigned a target name and snuck around school with a plastic knife at all times ready to stab them
Jeez! I learned how to be invisible and literally hide in front of the dorm counselors faces. It was so wild. One evening after lights-out I snuck down to a friends room and was literally 3 feet away from the door when the dorm counselor came in. All they needed to do was glance to the right.
Another time I was sneaking to my girlfriend’s room after lights-out. My dorm counselor (different one from previous story) was still awake and her office was still wide open. She was sitting in a chair watching TV. Did I mention the chair was facing the door? So, I recalled all the stories about no sudden movements blend into the background etc. I creeped by pretty as you please without her even noticing that I was there.
A friend of mine became the equivalent of a mob boss. She had people who owed/did favors for her and she monopolized the ramen and soda industry within the dorms.
Also, one never stops jumping at the sound of jingling keys…..
So, since I actually work around boats all day and also have a thing for blathering about the voidfaring life, here’s a few things I wanted to share that maybe other people might find helpful for adding some realism and believability to their own fictions involving the same things.
Naming Conventions: Ships are often referred to incorrectly in fiction. A ship’s name does not have “the” in front of it, unless that is actually part of the name of the vessel. Example sentence:
Correct: Vengeful Spirit was an exceptional vessel, the only Scylla variant-build ever constructed of the ancient and intimidating Gloriana pattern.
Incorrect: The Vengeful Spirit awaited them, a hulking monstrosity cruising slowly just above atmos as she waited in low orbit.
Now, this is not a hard and fast rule. There is a time that you can call a ship “the -name-,” and that is if the ship has been destroyed/sunk/decommissioned, is a piece of history thought to be destroyed, etc. Examples of this: The Black Pearl, the Edmund Fitzgerald. Just be aware that, generally, if your ship in question is still in service and has not become a legend yet, she probably doesn’t have “the” in front of her name. However, you /can/ name a vessel The Fickle Female, or something like that,in which case “the” is part of the name and is fine. Also, pirate ships and privately-run vessels may have “the” in front of their names, though this can make them sound a bit hokey and corny. Another semi-exception is when using the vessel’s full name/title, example “the U.S.S. Enterprise” or “the H.M.S. Titanic” (although Titanic could also call under the “historical indicator from “the.” Passengers who are not familiar with shipfaring may also think of the vessel as “the Glorious Name,” but your crew, and most likely your omniscient narrator, would not.
Long story short? If your vessel left for her maiden voyage ten or a hundred years ago and hasn’t yet left service… no need for “the”– especially if it’s a crewman doing the talking.
Terminology: Ships have their own words for everything. Here’s a quick rundown:
Berth/Berthing: places where crew or possibly passengers sleep. Quarters: Same as above, but generally insinuating more luxurious accommodations. Bow: The front/nose of the ship, as a noun Stern: The rear/ass end of the ship, as a noun. Prow: The very front of the bow, the “nose” of a ship. Transom: The flat “ass” of a ship. Engines: Whatever makes your ship go. Boats may have motors, but ships have engines. Bulkhead: An interior wall of a ship. Gunwale: Pronounced “gunnel.” The outside “wall” of the ship as created by the hull. Hatch: A door or doorway. You can close a hatch or walk through a hatch. Hatchway: Doorway. You cannot “close” a hatchway, but only walk through it. Porthole: a window Ahead: To engage the engines in a way that the ship moves forward, as in “full steam ahead.” Astern: To engage the engines in such a way that the ship moves backward/in reverse. Deck: Any “floor” in or on the ship. Stuff you walk on. Topside/abovedecks: the “outside area” of a boat. Where you can stand and feel the air on your face. Belowdecks: “inside” the ship’s hull. “below” is a shortening of this. Bilge: A pump that removes water (or whatever) from inside the vessel. Scuttle: to trash something or throw it out. Scuttlebutt: Rumors and gossip, trashtalking. Galley: The kitchen. Head: bathrooms Bridge: The part of the ship where it is controlled. Helm: Phrase for describing the person actually controlling the ship’s movements. The person “at the helm” is the person making the decisions, not the person with the wheel in their hands. If your captain tells his first mate, “Six degrees to starboard, steady on”, the captain is at the helm. If the first mate is making that decision himself because the captain can’t, he’s “at the helm.” Moorings: attachment to a dock. “moored” meaning attached in this way. Flotsam: Stuff floating in the water, or in space. Masts: Big posts that sails fly from. Boom: Big post going across the mast that sails attach to. Make fast: tie shit down Eye: a round thing to tie to or pass a rope through. Cleat: a thing for tying shit to. Lines: Ropes. Hold: Any large space inside of a ship to put shit, or “stow” it.
There’s lots more, and lots if you want to get into sailing vessels involving the names for the different sails and masts and such, but this is enough to get you started.
Directions and time:
Ships have their own way of designating the “directions” on the ship. Aft and stern are not synonyms: aft is a direction, the stern is the actual physical part of the ship. Same with forward and bow.
Forward: The “front” direction, anything from the middle of the ship to the very tip of the prow.
Aft: The ass end direction. Anything from the middle to the very farthest back part of the ship.
Port: If you are standing on the ship and looking forward, this is going to be on your left. It’s easy to remember because “left” and “port” both have four letters.
Starboard: Pronounced “starberd.” The “right” side of the ship, if you are standing on the ship, looking forward. Two R’s in starboard– “right.”
This is helpful in writing because you can use these words to describe how your characters move about their surroundings, IE, “She looked up, lost, heading what she assumed was aftward.”
Ships generally have their own clock and specific time. Even today in real life, submarines will have their own times and clocks, often with each crewmember on his own clock.
Summary: Idk people, talk about the cool shit in your spaceships more! Hope this helped.
