(no subject)

[beccaelizabeth]

I sat down to write about dragons in a relationship

I am currently constructing a plot from facts learned this afternoon, including but not limited to how snipers estimate wind, what's the longest shot a sniper ever made, and why ipads are shipped via Anchorage.
I had not previously had any thoughts whatsoever to do with Anchorage, and yet, here I am, making plots there.
Which will inevitably sound stupid to anyone who actually knows from Anchorage, or Alaska, or indeed America.
But if I set the stories around the places I do know? ... there isn't a whole lot of crime around here, let alone international supervillain crime. I mean, ordinary alcohol is involved crime, sure, every month something, but, like, story crimes, no.
Not that there are many of those anyway.


Ipads are shipped via Anchorage because FedEx built a gigantimous facility there in about 1990. Fedex built there because once you look at things on a sphere it's actually really central? 9.5 hours from almost anywhere indutrialised, as the plane flies, and stopping there to refuel means carrying more cargo faster. Either third or fifth busiest airport for cargo traffic in the world, says different things different places. Stuff from Shanghai tends to go through Anchorage. These all being like geography and physics facts they would apply to stuff being shipped by fictional evil organisations. I may or may not need to invent some names of fictional evil organisations. I may rely on the fact that Clint is a very new agent who doesn't always get told shit.

Snipers estimate wind speed by, amongst other things, mirage above hot things. Or bendy plant life. Or flags.
I imagine being very cold and covered in snow and without flags would be a bit inconvenient for them.
Alaska appears to be really very cold and mostly snow and frequently dark.
Which seems like a good start if you want someone to really look magic.

I also am learning more about wind speeds in Alaska than I had ever previously vaguely wondered.
*blinks*



Fictional evil organisation flies its shiny things in and then realises SHIELD might find them and decides to hide them in the middle of nowhere. There's probably a lot of nowhere around. The maps of Alaska I found had distances measured in flying times. There seem to be several of England in every direction. The distances in my head are really small.

So now I'm just wondering how far away from that first super busy airport they'd have to go to be in proper middles of nowheres, and whether said nowhere would be the mostly flat sort or the uppy downy sort. I actually only started out looking for pictures to plonk a story into, but so far I've found pictures of landscapes with no snow, which the weather graphs suggest are like 3 months of the year, or pictures of smiling people surrounded by snow, which aren't terribly informative.

I mean all I've got to do is have the briefing say 'They've got a base a couple hours outside Anchorage' and the story will work as well as it needs to, but there's just so much shiny data in the world now, I end up wandering around google maps with the little dude and wondering if getting up for an 0645 train in that much cold would ever be worth it. (Apparently it's a very scenic route.) (Scenic possibly meaning vertical.)
That bit on the google maps has lots of up and down bits. Okays.
... wow my grasp of everything is slim, this is what I get for being all F&SF all the time, I'd have more luck describing Jupiter. (Cloudy, with a chance of squashed.)







Now I kind of want to write about the SHIELD base in Anchorage, Alaska. That would not be a popular posting.


... I am aware this is what I do when I'm not actually writing. This is what happens when I run out of plot, I end up 'researching' the weirdest things...

Comments

[jesuswasbatman]

All you have to do wherever you are is work out what kind of ancient alien/mystic/Atlantean artifact might have been buried there millenia ago and then send some good guys and bad guys after it?

[beccaelizabeth]

This is very true, and does work everywhere.

[the_rck]

There's someone fannish on my reading list who lives in Alaska-- sholio. Perhaps they might be open to questions about Alaska. I don't know. It can't hurt to ask.

[baronjanus]

All I got on Anchorage is from Northern Exposure

Went and googled Norwich crime statistics

Actually decided that would be kinda cool - not the crime, the supervillains landing anywhere that's smallish and English. But not the peaceful rural type, and not central London, somewhere that's middle. Somewhere that's middle in every way.

Researching is fun and educational. Where do you get your sniper info?

[beccaelizabeth]

Sniper info: I just google for Sniper, or sniper doctrine, sniper accounting for wind, stuff like that. Plus reading GURPS rule books. The US military is surprisingly informative, UK military recruitment pages will talk up most topics too, newspapers were going on about snipers because a new training course was getting funded and then because movie, and there's a lot about marksmanship for competition that kind of applies. And then there's pages by people who reckon they're ex military and are very vague in the name of security. It's difficult to rate those though. Filtering out the ones that are meant to be roleplay resources or roleplay takes some fiddling too.
And because I only wanted it as flavour I don't think I've been saving my sources. :eyeroll:


Norwich is kind of cool. Norfolk has the lowest crime stats in the country, partly I think from being very boring so no one bothers, but also quite nice.
I have some urban fantasy ideas set around here. It's easy to imagine people hiding around here. And there's lots of tunnels and old buildings made of flint and so forth, contrasting with the new concrete and glass places, so that's handy.
Supervillains seem like they'd be in a different idiom, different language than local. Don't know. But Avengers did film at the university, so we kind of did had supers...

[baronjanus]

Shiny info is shiny.

Cool re university!

I just like to mess with tropes sometimes, for fun's sake. Supervillains in the most unexpected places.