I laughed. I'll admit it.

...brilliant.

But is Nate prepared to get up at midnight to feed him, and to clean up after him?

Yeah. Yesterday was very long, with not much sleep. I was getting pretty loopy towards the end there.

.....

I might still be a little loopy.

But the good kind of loopy.

I can't remember and I'm having trouble finding where it is, but did the Knights ever say which way the nearest large population center is? If they did and Felix knows you can assume he includes that information as well.

I don't think they ever actually said.

They said the Capital was five days' ride along the road going that way - exactly where or how far that means was never better specified than that. (Nor was it ever specified whether or not the Capital is the nearest large settlement). Sir Ulath has a map that marks the locations of nearby cities (as has been noted, Sir Ulath's map is hardly going to be all that wonderfully accurate given available mapping techniques, but it's the best estimate you'll get as to location).

LATRAAV?

Sorry. Light All Terrain Reconnaissance And Attack Vehicle. A glorified dune buggy with guns. Similar to a Fast Attack Vehicle.

Well we don't have any gasoline to fuel them and any battery operated ones would be completely drained and unlikely to be recharged to a good state any time soon given our current power situation.

Honestly I really want to know if launching a solar satellite is a viable solution to our power needs. Round up all the solar panels, put them on a satellite, launch them into geostationary orbit over the ship and have them beam energy back down to our ship 24/7. That'd be awesome.

You don't need gas if you put a wood gas generator or gasifier on the back of the vehicle. In addition, the same unit can be used to make synthetic oil and gas/diesel fuel using the Fischer–Tropsch process when not being used to run the vehicle. Since there would appear to be a surplus of wood around, this would seem to be an ideal solution.

Yeah there's that.

I agree that satellites are an excellent idea. Communications, weather, mapping, spy, and even orbital weapons platforms would be very cool. But we're going to need fuel to put them all up there, and that is going to take a fair amount of sophistication and building to do. We may as well use a really big gasifier to make that fuel and power the ship off the waste heat at the same time. Satellites will happen, but it's going to be one of those things we build up to.

Depends on what sort of propulsion we're capable of. If we brought any sort of rocketry tech with us and that tech is capable of some kind of electricity based propulsion all we'd have to do is stick a bunchy of batteries on it and launch it that way.

I dunno why I didn't think of this earlier, though... Why go through all the bother of sticking a wood gasifier on the back of a vehicle (or building one and making fuel then using that to fuel the vehicle) when we can just stick a spare solar panel from the warehouse on the back of one of our battery operated vehicles? If our vehicles have enough battery life to make it from our ship to the farming village they'll have no problem charging themselves back up and making their way back to the ship. A lot less hassle for everyone involved.

Or plug the car into the windmill that's powering the village hospital to charge it up for the way home.