Shipboard Navigating

thefoodgeek

I'm making a document for hopeful inclusion into the CruiseMonkey app. It has a bunch of tips on navigating the ship, gathered from things that the Facebook folk had to say. I've not yet dealt with anything specifically having to do with levels, and my memory of just exactly the best way to get to some places is hazy. For example, Studio B is a pain, especially since the most direct route is through the smoky casino. So if anyone has a clear memory of the best way to get to some locations in an easy to remember manner, or any other tricks like the one below, please let me know. 

-----------

Go through the mall instead of the casino to get to Studio B (a.k.a. Ice Rink)Fore is the front of the ship when moving foreward

• Most entertainment, game room / Sea Monkey Central, lounges, and Spa/Fitness Center are to the fore of the ship.

Aft is the rear of the ship, or what comes after the ship has passed. The ocean flows aft.

• Dining, Studio B, business/study services, limited-access clubs, simulated outdoor experiences, Concierge Club, and the Champagne Bar are aft.

Getting from Fore to Aft is best done:

• Indoors levels 5-10. 5 through the Promenade. 6-10 through port and starboard passages past the staterooms
• Outdoors 11-12 or the exterior promenades on 4.
• If you don’t mind smoke, you can go indoors level 4 through the casino.

Facing Fore, Port is Left. Starboard is Right. Port has the same number of letters as Left. Right and Starboard have more letters than Left and Port.Look at the hundreds place of room numbers.

• If it’s below 5, you are in a Starboard corridor.
• If it’s above 4, you are in a Port corridor.
• In some cases, you might be in an aft-most area, or an offshoot hallway. You’ll probably know if you’re in one of these places or not.

Room numbers get larger the farther Aft you are, smaller the farther Fore you are.Even number rooms are exterior. Odd number rooms are interior.Pay attention to the art in the stairwells, and note which are fore and which are aft.Maps in the hallways are always oriented to the direction of the ship.Needs verification:

• The car in the mall faces aft.
• The lamps outside the cabins have a flat and a curved side. Curved side points fore, and flat side points aft. Presumably for aerodynamics?

isildur42

• If it’s below 5, you are in a Starboard corridor.
• If it’s above 4, you are in a Port corridor.

That seems....backwards...?

TrishaLynn

I sure as hell can't do this and it would take more time to implement than the three weeks we've got left, but wouldn't it be awesome if there was a way to incorporate Crazy Taxi-style navigation and way-finding into Cruise Monkey? I'm thinking that all you'd really need to do is to stash a beacon at each important location and program a section of the app to way-find towards it.

I can't imagine how much work it would take to do, and I'm also imagining that you'd need RCI's help to stash beacons and work out the 'pathing, but if done properly, this could be a pretty-good revenue generator for a cruise line.

thefoodgeek

I can rephrase so that it's "4 and below" and "5 and above" if what I have is going to confuse people. You can see what I'm talking about in the deck plans.

Angelastic

'4 or below' and '5 or above' would be less amenable to nitpicking, with the current phrasing of the tip.

If the hundreds place is 4.2, you are in a starport corridor.

Theanderblast

I've always wanted to go to Starport!

Port and four have the same number of letters, which might help as a mnemonic 

autojim

Pretty sure the Viking Crown Lounge/Diamond Club/Chapel is accessed through the Aft elevator column, not the Fore elevator column.

anotherjen

Thank you! This looks very helpful!

thefoodgeek

Edits made.

Lissa

Here's one for remembering port & starboard: 

When facing the bow of the ship (foreward), Port is to the left and starboard is to the right. Both "left" and "port" have 4 letters. 

I heard that little trick on my first cruise and it stuck.

RangerRick

There's no way I'd be able to get beacon navigation in, but it is tempting to log wifi access point strengths to be able to implement shipboard GPS or something.  

Problem is by next year when I could use that data, they'd likely have moved things around.  Would have to implement some kind of machine-learning thing and do it during the cruise or something to make it work.  

RangerRick

For the list of fore vs. aft, instead of having a huge list like that, I wonder if it would instead be useful to just add some sort options to the Amenities list in CM.  Alphabetical, by deck, fore/aft., type of amenity (Entertainment, Dining, etc.)?

AuntiLaura

I started to memorize the theme of the art in the various stairwells.

Angelastic

I remember the phrase 'there's a little port left in the bottle' as a general mnemonic to know what 'port' means, but it's no help on the ship as I don't usually know whether I'm facing the bow. So I guess I'll just figure out where I am by looking at the stateroom numbers and remembering that port and five have the same number of letters.

Actually it should be easier for me this time since my cabin is at the Fore-th pole. On the last cruise my strategy was to go to the mall where I could see everything, and look at signs and interactive maps whenever possible.

thefoodgeek

Agreed on the big list of amenities, @rangerrick. I think the quick description before the list fits in better with the navigation idea, and maybe as you say, have options somewhere else.

Also, if you could make a meaningful and useful indoor navigation system, whether in a day or three years, the world would be your bivalve. 

BrettGlass

Actually, department stores are already installing devices that track Wi-Fi-enabled cell phones and tablets around a store by their MAC address, so they know exactly where the owner of the device goes. They are thinking about trying to text them coupons based on their location, but so far customers have told them that this is too creepy. A direction finding app for entire malls is only a small conceptual step away... and what is an RCI ship if not a big, floating mall?

thefoodgeek

It depends on how much precision you want. Probably for our purposes, if we could get within a few yards, we'd be doing pretty well. That's not nearly as bad as centimeter resolution, which would be close to impossible.

But the sheer amount of metal around will probably cause problems even for low-res stuff. Opening and closing doors would be very likely to change your perceived position, for example. But if we widen it out to be "Which floor am I on, and am I closer to the fore or aft elevators," it could be useful and maybe even feasible.

That being said, if we had a quick and easy way to choose floor/side or room number or point of interest for to and from directions, that would get us most of the way there as well. But not as cool as the phone telling you if you're going the wrong way. 

stevendj

But not as cool as the phone telling you if you're going the wrong way.

"Where do you think you're going, Dave?"

"Studio B."

"I'm sorry, Dave. I can't allow you to do that."

"All right, phone. I'll go through the Mustache Formal on the Lido Deck."

"Without your fez, Dave? You're going to find that rather difficult."

Angelastic

Phones already use the locations of WiFi base stations to supplement the location information from GPS and cell towers, so that's sort of like what Brett was talking about in reverse, since the phones are tracking themselves because Skyhook already knows exactly where the WAPs around the stores are. On a moving ship it would be a little silly to combine the information from WiFi and GPS, though.

I think the existing interactive displays are pretty good at telling you which floor you're on and whether you're fore or aft, and how to get where you're going. It's probably not worth trying to duplicate that in an app. Perhaps all people need to do is use their phones to take photos of those directions (or draw them on the in-app deck plan) so they can check them if they forget where they're going before they get there. Or if someone does want to code their own route-finding thingy using the deck plans (or if we can get the cruise line's data on that), people could simply enter their room numbers and then be able to see the route between their rooms and each point of interest.

RangerRick

@Angelastic Yeah, I wasn't seriously considering it, although it was a fun thought experiment.  

There are a lot more immediately useful things I could do if I was going to spend that amount of time adding more features to CM.

Kvort_the_Duck

I found that getting from the aft stairs to the fore stairs (or vice-versa) was very difficult at times. It seemed that the only options were going through the casino level (not nearly as fun as when Sonic did it) or through the promenade, which was often full of people. (People! My old arch-nemeses)

Eventually I realized that there is nothing stopping you from traversing the corridors on either side of the ship. (Well, except for the lower two decks, I think? There's some stoppage there in the way of doors, bulkheads, etc.) On the other floors however, it's usually much easier to do than going through the main public areas.

I know from other comments that I wasn't the only one having this mental block, so I thought I'd share.

Also, I can't decide if I like calling it the casino level because it reminds me of Sonic, or hate calling it the casino level because it's not nearly as much fun.

dndgirl

@Kvort_the_Duck Brilliant!

thefoodgeek

Yeah, I'll have to see if we can verify which floors are unfriendly to fore-aft traversal even on interior or exterior corridors. That would be a great list.

rhaje

Decks 2 and 3 are not officially sanctioned for fore/aft traversal. I know it can be done on 2 (only on one side), but I don't think there's any way to do it on 3.

Decks 4 and 5 can be traversed down the middle, though you may want to avoid 4 due to the casino if you hate smoke. (Also, due to the way the slot machines are laid out, there is no direct path, and you zig-zag a lot.) Weather and wind permitting, you can use the outdoor promenade on Deck 4 to bypass the casino. (Thanks, @chicazul!)

That means Deck 5 is the lowest you should be if you want to traverse fore/aft without passing through a smoking area or walking outside. Deck 5 is the Promenade, so it may be super crowded.

Decks 6-10 are mostly staterooms. You can easily traverse fore/aft in the port and starboard passages.

Decks 11-12 can be traversed fore/aft, though they are outside and weather/wind may be an issue. 11 is pools, hottubs, fitness center and buffet. 12 is the jogging track, the teen demographic area, and Johnny Rockets.

Decks > 12 are only accessible to passengers at the aft stairwell/elevators. There is no traversal. 13-15 are effectively a tower at the back of the ship.

chicazul

Deck three doesn't have corridors all the way through, which I recall being an aggravation because there's no direct psth from the theatre to the dining room. I thought deck two had a similar problem but it's not marked on the deck plans, anyone have a better memory? Four, (probably) five, eleven and twelve have exterior routes, whose desireability depends on the weather.

Edit: I am too slow, @rhaje! The outdoor promenades on 4 are worth mentioning though.

rhaje

I was outside for the muster drill, and when we had official things at the main pool, and once up at the bow... but I don't think I spent any other time on board on any of the exterior parts of the decks. They tend to slip my mind. :-)

I also don't mind cutting through the casino because smoke doesn't bother me, so that was usually my route.

hendusoone

A couple of times last year, I used Deck 1 to traverse the ship fore/aft. I'm not sure if I was supposed to do that, but I didn't see any signs saying no (I may have neglected to make a spot check), and nobody gave me looks or yelled at me for it... in fact, I don't recall seeing anybody at all down there.

arenson9

I traversed fore/aft on deck 2 (port side) many times before I realized it wasn't sanctioned. The tipoff was that there was a rack in the hallway that had costumes on it, as if they were used by the regular on-board entertainment. Later I noticed that there were some doors that looked like they could be used to close off the hallway. Towards the end of the cruise I started to feel a bit self-conscious about using that route. My guess is that if hordes of us started using it, the staff would feel compelled to keep those doors closed so we got the point that we weren't supposed to.

BrettGlass

On JCCC3, I went outdoors, around the highly toxic casino, most often when going fore and aft. Weather was good enough that I didn't mind doing this even in formalwear.

autojim

@hendusoone: aside from the medical facility (foreward stair/elevator column) and the gangways (fore and aft stairs/elevator columns) when in port, there aren't any passenger-authorized spaces on deck 1...

hendusoone

Thanks, @autojim - it's possible that I'm misremembering, but I remember there being a long straight hallway with a rubberized surface and metal walls/doors that ran the length of the ship, and a cargo area of some kind (possibly for temporary luggage storage?). I may have just done it while in port... I'll make a note to avoid it in the future

autojim

@hendusoone: Yes, that's there. But it's crew working space.

Sooper Sekrit Behind-The-Scenes Fact: last year, the Helper Monkeys schlepped (with the help of a couple baggage carts) all the registration supplies and merch that had been at the hotel for Saturday registration from dockside, through crew-entry security at the aft gangway on Deck 1, down that long corridor (the crew calls it Main Street), and to the Conference Center to set up for on-board registration. We were accompanied by a friendly and helpful member of the Independence of the Seas crew for this task.

nemaihne

Tangential Question: will there be Saturday registration at the hotel again this year?

chicazul

@nemaihne Tangential answer: No hotel registration this year! All of that will be done on Sunday after boarding. (:

rhaje

Yup, all of the registration materials are already in Florida, and they will be loaded onto the ship this weekend. They get an extra week at sea, so that when we board a week later, they are already in-place for us to get started.

To those of us responsible for the inventory and transportation of boxes on previous cruises, this is a great relief. :-)

mikesphar

Wow, all of our supplies get to cruise more than we do!

RickS

@rhaje Wow, that's good organization. The Home Office is really taking it to the next level!

kate

I can't tell you how excited I am by this new arrangement, @rhaje! But, you already knew that.

dndgirl

Registration takes place in the Game Room, I presume?

JadeSnake

You presume correctly. It'll get turned over into the game room after reg and merch have cleared out.