Alex Connor

In the interests of fairness to British ships... A Leda class frigate is built with 12in wide oak frames, spaced 2-4in apart (the diameter of a 24lb cannonball is 5.8in) except for 5 places where the gap tapers from 8in at the top to 2in at the bottom so that the frames flow correctly from bow to stern taking into account that the deck is longer than the keel. These gaps are filled with fir, both for strength and to prevent water building up in the gaps, meaning the hull is a consistent thickness. At the waterline the hull frames are 10in thick, with 6in external and 4.5in internal oak planking for a total thickness of 20.5in, tapering to 16in total over the gundeck, with hanging knees 20in thick at the top and 5in at the bottom. Which means the maximum possible thickness for a cannonball to hit is slightly over 40 inches of English Oak.

I do like these Dutch SoL, very distinctive and attractive. Best I can do for plans are these, although unfortunately they are not the Vrijheid but another Dutch 74, Washington and also in pretty bad condition. Royal Museums Greenwich has the plans for Vrijheid but they don't seem to be viewable online.

http://threedecks.org/index.php?display_type=show_ship&id=5458 Surprise is 129ft on the gundeck, Mordaunt only 122ft 6in. There was a big change in ship sizes between the late 1600s when Mordaunt was built and the Napoleonic era.

Just to clear up any confusion, this is not the same HMS Java that fought the Constitution. The HMS Java that fought the Constitution was a smaller ship, a captured french Hebe/Pallas class frigate originally called Renomee of 1073 tons bm and armed with 28x18lb cannon on the maindeck plus 18x32lb carronades and 2x9lb cannon on the weather deck. The HMS Java in this thread was a latter ship built to match the Constitution and her sisterships, so she is 1457 tons bm and carries 30x24lb cannon on the maindeck plus 28x42lb carronades and 2x24lb cannon on the weather deck.

Ship itself is very small, smaller than any of the frigates we have ingame (even Surprise).

The HMS Java that fought Constitution was a captured french Hebe-class frigate. I knew the US had built a ship called Java in commemoration of the battle, but until now I didn't realize the British also built another Java, unusual to reuse the name of a beaten ship... Btw, here's one of the Java class frigates, Winchester, was still in service in 1921 as a training ship.

I stopped playing them. Besides, not like they will remove tanks or aircraft they have already built (especially for reasons that would cover half the units ingame).

I don't like WoT for this reason (among others), everyone is running around in paper tanks and prototypes, the real tanks that fought in WW2 are all but forgotten.

As meatpukk says,Trincomalee is a Leda class frigate, and the design for these dates from 1796 (when HMS Leda was ordered).

Wasn't built till 1837.

Not happening, way out of the game's time period (1670-1820)

Bellona

Sure. I mean, we could build USS Java, she's a '44' with 32lb guns on the maindeck, there's 1820s French frigates with 30lb cannon on both decks and any number of 60 or so gun frigates that were built as counters to the United States class, but none of them really saw combat or have much historical significance. I'd rather the top ship in class be something that did see combat and did play an important role.

If you want a counter to Constitution, HMS Leander or Newcastle would be better, at least they saw combat. I'd be a bit wary of unseating Constitution as the "ultimate frigate" though.

I recognise that last quote Was describing the battle from memory, and its not even a very good description. For a start, I said 7 ships, it was in fact 8, not 5 but 6 frigates, one of them a razeed 74 larger than the Constitution (and 250 tons heavier than the Glatton) armed with 24lb guns, two 18lb and three 12lb frigates along with a brig-corvette and a cutter. Glatton encountered these ships off the coast off Flushing, and despite believing they were the enemy and the numbers disparity Glatton closed to check their identity. For some reason the French ships did not attack Glatton, allowing her sail up alongside the largest ship (the razee Brutus) and hail her. Upon being hailed Brutus hoisted the French flag, whereupon Glatton demanded her surrender. This was answered by a broadside, Glatton's reply was immense and devastating. Brutus sheered off, only her origins as a 74 saved her from being completely disabled by a broadside heavier than that of a 1st rate. Glatton then engaged in a linefight with the two 18lb frigates and Brutus, they firing at her rigging to dismast her and drive her onto the coast. After around 20 minutes fighting the larger frigates they had taken enough and withdrew, their places taken by the three 12 pdr frigates that had up to this point only been firing from long range. Despite Glatton having lost all 3 topmasts at this point these three fared no better and were forced to retreat like the others. With all 6 frigates in flight now the brig and cutter abandoned their positions on Glatton's stern and fled after them, aided by a couple of broadsides as they did. Glatton carried out rough repairs during the night, and finding the french still in sight the next morning then pursued them into port. There are unconfirmed reports one of the French frigates sunk in port from the damage received (there is no official french report of the action but fishermen afterwards informed a British ship that a frigate had sunk in the harbour and 3 or 4 more were heavily damaged). So yeah, don't underestimate Indiamen (especially in converted warship form)

Endymion is on my "I want to build someday" list, but I really need to get something finished and ingame before I start another project Terrible habit of starting stuff and jumping to something else before its complete lol

Warships don't have spare room for cargo. Well, not much at least. Their holds aren't as big as a purpose built merchantman, and what room you have is taken by provisions, ammunition and spares. Which you need a lot more of, since a warship has more crew, more cannon (and fires them more often) and is more likely to have to repair battle damage. You don't have spare room on the gundecks either, that's needed for the aforementioned guns and for crew quarters. You don't need the weather deck for crew, but you don't really want to put any serious weight up there either. So if you want to carry any bulky cargo (high value low volume doesn't count) you will need to remove guns and the crew needed for them, which frees up space both in the hold and on decks. And if you aren't looking fights you don't need many spares either, so suddenly you do actually have a decent amount of cargo space. Not as much as purpose built merchantship, but enough to be useful. Any opportunistic cross between carrying cargo and privateering will be a compromise (but quite possibly a functional one), you can't have full cargo and full armament so you'll have to balance them.

Merchantmen and warships are both tailored for their respective roles and passable at best when used for the opposite purpose. You can up arm an Indiaman, but it won't be able to carry as large guns as a similar sized warship because Indiamen are built narrower so their high-capacity boxy hullforms don't cost them all speed. And you can strip out a frigates maindeck, reduce the crew to the minimum required to sail the ship and man the guns that are left, but it still won't carry as much cargo as an Indiaman of the same length and will actually have less firepower. The only advantage would be speed (and the chance of scaring off people who don't realize you are unarmed).

I built this model of Shannon, but like people are saying she is Trincomalee's sistership so getting her ingame is not a high priority and I'm working on another model instead. There are some differences between the ships, Trincomalee was from a later batch of the class so she has a different stern gallery and style of bow, but I'm not sure its worth another model (especially because the "complete" model is only the first step, rigging, animating, making LOD models, damage models etc needed for the ship to be functional ingame can be a lot more work than just the original model was).

Merchant ships very rarely (if ever) carried a full complement of guns and had small crews for their size. For example, you might have an Indiaman pierced for 56 guns on two decks, but it carries just 26 guns (and small ones for its size), not even one full gundeck and with just 125 crew. Sometimes the empty gunports would be planked over, other times left to provide ventilation. If you press that vessel into navy service (as happened many times during periods of emergency) then you simply arm every gunport with suitable sized guns and give her a crew of 350 and you have a pretty good stand-in for a 4th rate. Privateers might do similarly if they could not afford a purpose built ship. That's all pirates would be doing, opening up empty or uncut gunports and arming them to turn a merchant vessel into a makeshift warship, nothing special because everyone else did it, even the bigger trading companies sometimes when they needed escorts. If pirates did get hold of a real warship (pretty rare occurrence) they'd just keep it, no need to make modifications because its already better than any normal pirate ship.

Aren't volume controls a built in windows feature? You could just use the mixer to turn down the game volume individually without turning down everything else.

We have this ship already (currently removed from game for performance optimization and reworking). As Captain Armstrong said, its a Chapman design (linked below) with a fictitious backstory and British style stern gallery.

Yeah, that's quite a horrible model (all work on details and forgetting overall shape and appearance, I hate this) Here is the side profile of one of the other 64s razeed at the same time as Indefatigable, Magnanime (3rd example was HMS Anson), beautiful ships even by frigate standards.

With the lack of reliable information on Rattlesnake all we've really got to go on is the various sources all seem to agree she was fast. And then we can look at the plans and go "unusually narrow hull for her length, fine lines, fast sounds right". Saying that she wasn't as fast as the Trincomalee is really just informed speculation based on the fact that it would take an extraordinary hull design to overcome the top speed disadvantage of being only 60% the waterline length. Similar for saying she wouldn't lose as much speed in lighter winds, that's just general knowledge that smaller ships don't tend to suffer as much when the wind drops, and with Rattlesnake appearing to be fast for her size she might well end up faster than a frigate in certain wind conditions. The armaments details, those are solid though, we have plenty of ships to compare the dimensions they needed to operate different calibers which is why I'm confident saying 4 pdrs are the most likely armament (and that if she did have 6 pdrs they would have been very hard to reload).

4pdrs aren't to be disregarded, after all Cochrane's little HMS Speedy was armed with them and she defeated a frigate... I think more of the small ships should be using 4pdrs, right now they can all use 6pdrs without noticeable penalty so the 4pdr caliber is a bit redundant. Something along the lines of 4pdrs with no penalty or 6pdrs with their inherently longer reload plus a penalty for being longer than properly fits into a ship that size. Would make it a real choice rather than automatically taking the heaviest gun available.