Marion van Ghent

Also, the Mayflower was a pinnace or small galleon -- not a fluyt Fluyts had a round stern, high length-to-beam ratio, and narrow deck on top of a broad hull. The last two characteristics were to reduce taxes (particularly the Sound tax levied by Denmark on ships passing through the Øresund) and created a surprisingly fast cargo ship.

Explorer 80% Socialiser 47% Achiever 40% Killer 27% Yarr! I've been places and found things you've ne'er e'en heard of -- outside o' me yakkin' 'bout it in the Tavern! But if ye try to steal me loot, I'm like as not to give you the slip rather than slit yer throat.

Of course, I'm going to point out that in the majority of cases port governors were appointed by regional governors/viceroys, etc. and not elected. This varied of course on a national basis; e.g. mayors were elected in England and the Netherlands, but appointed in royal France, Spain, and much of the rest of Europe. Not that this necessarily makes for great gameplay Modeling it realistically probably would entail having NPCs in such offices, with which individuals and guilds might be able to curry favour -- either from doing tasks for them or outright bribery. And while many players dream of "running a town" in-game, but there may be scores of lesser offices that could be filled by players with appropriate influence.

Just to play Devil's advocate... While it's a clear preference, the sample size is small. Admins and moderators might have a better sense of whether or not it is representative of the active members. (As is usually the case with pre-launch game forums, we have a fairly small number of very vocal members, and an unknown number of "active lurkers" who are reading but just not posting anything.)

One thing to remember with a day sail is that it all depends on the wind I lucked out when booking on the Lady Washington some years ago; at least when we started, cruising on Puget Sound, there was a good 20-22 knot breeze going. Lady loved it! ...but then an hour or so in, the wind died completely, so we had to slink back to dock under engines. But at least I got a taste of ideal conditions for a nimble little brig.

I play baroque flute and recorders (flûte à bec)... as well as other renaissance woodwinds when I can get my hands on them

These are all great images But two questions: 1) Can we -- as Mirones is requesting -- get some info/context/links to sources? 2) Should this be split off into its own thread, so this one stays about tacking?

Perhaps tomorrow I can poke around for links, but it's late and quiet time in the house now But I dare say Googling any of the above composers or searching for them on YouTube will likely turn up recordings; they just may or may not be historically informed performances (for which I am a stickler! Viola da gamba player here...).

All in all I like your plans for the damage model in Naval Action. I'm not even sure there's much to discuss thereupon. Where things get interesting -- and potentially complex -- are a) how it is indicated for the player (UI) and how and when a player can repair or mitigate damage. For example, as others have suggested, having heel and underwater damage interact is a potentially important gameplay element. Holes that are high and dry on one tack may flood when on the other. If this is implemented, a player needs this information and needs to be able to direct crew to repair the damage -- ideally before the holes become submerged. Compared to a simple hull damage and "repair hull" button, the complexity of the UI is increased dramatically. Similarly, if multiple fires can break out on a ship -- say one on the forecastle and one on the gun deck astern -- a player may need to know the severity thereof and direct crews to one or the other or both. On top of directed repairs and other crew factors -- say pulling men from the guns to make or reduce sail or cut away fallen rigging or repel boarders -- things can get very complex, very quickly! Personally I'm all for the complexity, but I also appreciate that it would be best practice to have AI handle these priorities sensibly if one is otherwise occupied (or still learning the game and getting used to it). No small task, so I'm wondering just how "deep" Game Labs intends to get here. On the one hand, depth increases player involvement and keeps interest in the game; on the other hand, it increases the steepness of the learning curve. ----- As for rigging damage and repair, I do hope that it will be impossible to do whilst under effective fire. I understand that's another tricky subject, though. Perhaps if "crew suppression" is a factor -- e.g. if exposed crew is "stunned" or otherwise less effective when actively taking heavy casualties -- it can be done well. I also hope that repairs will be limited -- i.e. you only have so many spare spars and masts, and none of them can be a full replacement for a lost lower mast. I'd love seeing a ship limp out of line, under cover of friendly ships, jury-rigging a spare main topmast to replace its lost foremast ----- Lastly, one quick note on fire control. It is my understanding (from Lavery and other sources) that the same pumps used to control flooding were used for fighting larger fires. This means that the number of functional pumps a ship has can be very important: if you're a small merchantman with only two pumps, a leaky hold, and a fire on deck, you'd damned well better hope neither pump gets shot away I do recall that sometime in the mid 18th century the pumping action was improved enough to allow spraying of the rigging; if I can find that information later (possibly tomorrow) I'll post it should no one beat me to the punch.

Dietrich Buxtehude, Christopher Simpson, J. F. Fasch, and lots of Telemann. (Not so much Nightwish, Lacuna Coil, Within Temptation, or Corvus Corax lately... or Josquin, Isaac, and Ockeghem, either. Or Orlando Gibbons or William Lawes for that matter.)

That's one reason why even into the 1730s or so ships would run under courses in bad weather, as opposed to under topsails. It took a while for captains to really embrace reefed topsails as the best canvas for a heavy blow.

Very nice post, Ryan. Did want to point out that the Kalmar Nyckel was used in the 2nd quarter of the 17th century (1625-1640ish), not the late 1600s. Similarly the Gotheborg isn't a "late 1600's ship," but, as you point out, based on mid-18th century practice. I know, details, details... still an excellent rundown of the difficulties in tacking ships prior to circa 1660.

Voted. Silly me, missing the poll for the discussion

Ya learn somethin' new every day... thanks Kala4!

That actually is a concern with non-anonymous post rating, but -- at least so far -- these fora appear to be rather civilised. That said I do miss the personal touch of knowing who agrees -- or disagrees -- with what I'm saying.

That is the main performance difference between most fore-and-aft rigs and square rigs: where the best (and worst) point of sail for the ship is. For a sloop- or schooner-rigged vessel, best performance is on a beam reach to a close reach (90-70° off the wind). For a square rig it's on a broad reach (~120° off the wind). Square vs. fore-and-aft rigs also perform differently when sailing downwind. A square rig will usually sail better than a fore-and-aft when running with the wind (~170-180°), and a schooner (two-masted) rig will do better than a sloop (one-masted) rig. The square rig has a nice big amount of canvas dead centre; this pushes the ship well downwind. A sloop has the one large driver sail (plus, in this period, usually a small topsail), but that has to be skewed to one side or the other. That results in a less efficient transfer of energy than the square rig. But a two-masted schooner (or lugger or lateen rig) can "goose-wing" its sails, one to either side of the ship, balancing the force a little better than a single mast could. Also, since I misread your statement at first, I want to emphasise an important point that many people get wrong: A cutter or schooner is NOT inherently faster than a square rig! (You didn't say it was, but it was easy to misread what you wrote as saying that ) A ship's speed is influenced by its hull length, its length-to-beam aspect ratio, and its hull form. For the first two (length and aspect ratio), higher is better: a long ship will sail faster than a short ship, and a narrow ship will sail faster than a wide one. Other factors -- such as the state of the sea, point of sail, and how much canvas is being used -- can influence these general trends, but put two different rigs on the same hull and it won't make a bit of difference on how fast she goes. Don't underestimate length-to-beam, either. For example the fluyt has what appears to be a very round, blunt, and clumsy hull. But they also had very long hulls in relation to their beam (approaching a 5:1 or even 6:1 ratio), and were extremely fast and weatherly for their cargo capacity. This is why they were used for some 150 years and copied extensively by other European powers from their Dutch inventors.

Spasibo, Ink! If that last link is reliable in the slightest, that makes the cost of a barrel of wine seem much more reasonable. I'm also reminded that the book on the "anatomy" of HMS Blanchard (1719, I think) provides costs associated for the construction of that vessel. I can't go rummaging about for it at present but may be able to do so in the next couple days.

Jean Boudriot has, in his book «Le Navire Marchand, Ancien Régime: Étude historique et Monographie» ("The Merchant Ship, Ancient Regime: Historic Study and Monograph"), a section on the cost of a merchant ship. I will check what it says and edit this post once I no longer have a cat occupying my lap EDIT: I'm not going to reproduce all of Boudriot's calculations here, and he prefaces everything as being a very crude estimate... but for a merchant ship built on the Atlantic coast circa 1770, he estimates a total cost per ton of capacity at about 250 livres. This includes cost of labour (which would be about 960 man-hours per ton if I'm reading him correctly). Next I'll see if I can find some information that gives meaning to the figure of 250 livres... 2nd EDIT: Well so far my searches aren't yielding much fruit, though according to this site 250 livres would have been about £18 15s in 1709, but obviously exchange rates would have differed wildly throughout the period. That said, if I'm reading this text correctly (it's a poor scan and the relevant information is in a footnote on p. 203 and phrased ambiguously), in 1770 one tonneau of Toulouse wine was worth 500 livres. That seems... remarkably high.

I read this as "would require player skill," which is a good thing, n'est-ce pas? It becomes a lot easier if we see player names or ship names on an in-game HUD. You've been pounding the Agamemnon for 15 minutes, the Lion comes up to relieve and provide her cover... then the Agamemnon circles around to the rear of the line... it's still the same ship you hammered, possibly with some repairs, but in the end you'd still remember who she was and that she was forced out of formation for a while. Unless, of course, you have the attention span of a gnat. As Admin says, obviously, when you dig down to the machine language, it's all 1s and 0s. But maturin has a point about layering those 1s and 0s deep enough that a player would be oblivious to them. Give players enough other cues and any sort of HP bar becomes superfluous and, IMO, takes away an opportunity for player skill to shine through.

That[*] sounds needlessly gory and physically implausible, given how the scuppers are located on the upper deck of ships and the bulk of crew (thus casualties) is below them operating the guns in combat (at least on anything larger than small frigate). EDIT: [*] cross-posted with Oneironz; "that" refers to BrutishVulgarian's bloody scuppers idea. All we should need, in an ideal game, are reasonable representations of damage. Visuals with the rigging and hull are most obvious: lost spars or masts, shredded sails, thoroughly pockmarked planking, a handful of crew on deck, all these give an indication that a ship's not too well off. But it needn't be visual alone: a damaged ship behaves differently. She may have trouble keeping her head off the wind if, say, her bowsprit's gone. If she's taking on water she will slow down and be more apt to rolling. The crew, if suffering heavy casualties, will not be manning the sails or guns as sharply, and fewer are apt to be seen on deck. They will also be quieter as there are fewer of them, but that would only be apparent at close range. Again, though... this is an ideal scenario. Games, no matter how wonderful they are, are rarely ideal In particular, we may not -- at least in early versions of the game -- have visible crew. And even with visible crew, we probably won't have anywhere near the fidelity of Real Life Sensorium™ -- not all crew may be rendered on any given ship for graphic performance reasons, and besides, they're pixels on a screen. So what I'd prefer to see is to have one's own officers tell you, when asked about a given target (say, right-click on it), their observations. "I see about a dozen men on deck! Her rigging's thoroughly shot through! She's looks to be sailing fine." That can supplement what we see and hear, and make up for the incomplete picture we have due to this being a computer game -- without resorting to health bars. All the above said: it would be nice if some of the feedback could be "faked." Say you're a privateer or a pirate sailing a converted merchantman: such a ship won't be as obviously dangerous as a frigate or purpose-built privateer. 'Twouldn't it be fun to deliberately send half your crew belowdecks, be sloppy on the helm and play lame duck to lure a rival into thinking you're either easy prey or a harmless trader -- only to present them a nasty boarding surprise when they heave to?

Replied via PM as housekeeping details don't necessarily belong in an open forum

Twice now I've had substantial posts deleted, apparently by mistake. Only once was any explanation or apology given. Mistakes do happen; I know, I've been a forum moderator and made my share But I would like to strongly suggest that whenever it happens, someone on the moderator or administration team provide an explanation. It's only common courtesy, and the best moderation policy IMO is the most transparent one. If you'd like assistance developing policy with regard to moderation, please feel free to contact me. I'd be more than happy to donate a little of my time and expertise.

Some good points and interesting ideas there, tater This part I agree with the most -- so much that all I personally really want from Naval Action is a multiplayer combat/"skirmish" model. That said, if NA is to be a game I'd get involved with beyond that, I would still prefer a technologically and chronologically stable world without "resets" of the kind Admin floated earlier. For me it's a giant, jarring record skip. But as you said, YMMV -- and mine does on these particularly points. I'd far prefer seeing any "resets" be under the guise of "Oh, snap! Peace broke out! The politicos just reverted all our borders to what they were before the war started!" For me, that doesn't break my suspension of disbelief, which I guess is really what the "resets" come down to for me. As for meta-rank, while the notion itself seems all fine and good, I see a couple problems that would need to be overcome: 1) How does one assign ships at the very start of a game? 2) How (or should) the same players be prevented from dominating post commands after each "reset?" ... but those questions are perhaps better addressed in Method of obtaining vessels. In any case, I'm still left wondering what gameplay sacrifices the dev team sees inherent in having a stable, unified, fairly narrow historic period. As I posted in Viable variety, there are lots of possible rôles to fill in any given time period -- and ships for just about every rôle in each discrete time period. I'd really like to understand where the devs are coming from.

I also forgot to mention: dumping weight was, on the whole, better saved for getting off shoals/sandbars and the like. I couldn't tell you how many times I've seen accounts of "lightening the ship" to save it from that pernicious reef or bar; but I can only think of a couple instances where a ship did the same to gain speed, and at that mainly in the Napoleonic Wars and War of 1812.

I may not be Ryan but I can provide studied answers to most of these questions One could indeed gain speed by tossing overboard cargo, stores, guns, etc. But there's no set formula: how much you can toss (and how much you gain thereby) depends in large part on how heavily or lightly loaded your ship is already, and where that "extra" weight is. That is to say, if you're a merchantman -- lightly armed, and using cargo as the bulk of your ballast -- you won't be able to discard much to get away. Your guns, easily, because they're high relative to the centre of mass of your ship and losing weight there tends to increase your ship's "stiffness" -- resistance to heel, etc. That garners you a couple dozen tons at most. You could toss any cargo stored on your main deck too, but that will tend to be light and not get you much; but the more weight you get rid of up top, the more you can dig deeper into the hold to toss off water barrels and other heavier cargo and stores and not have your ship become too imbalanced. If you're loaded well past your load waterline (LWL), in theory you could throw away perhaps a hundred tons and greatly improve your sailing qualities; but that would take significant time and risk, as being a merchantman you're likely short on hands. And your ship -- being a bluff-bowed, flat-bottomed cargo hauler spreading much less canvas than a warship of equivalent tonnage -- can only go so fast. The same general principle holds for warships, but here you have more guns to remove and generally less cargo; your ballast, instead of being primarily your water stores and heavy cargo, is in the form of iron "pigs" laid along the bottom. So in some respects you have more room to manoeuvre here, but in others you don't: you're less likely to start over-loaded, which means you'll have less relative tonnage to discard. But it's easier to do as you've the crew for it. It also depends on which way you're wanting to go relative to the wind. Travelling therewith, you can probably get by discarding more tonnage than on a reach: your ship's tendency to pitch will only increase slightly compared to her tendency to roll or heel, so in the short term you can gain more relative speed (as you won't have to take canvas in until the wind comes more abeam). Just to ballpark it, and without doing any of the necessary calculations on any typical merchantman or warship, I'd say you'd be able to gain at most 5-10% more speed with a heavy-laden merchantman and 2-5% with a warship before your returns start diminishing. I'm not really sure what you mean by "unnotch' the masts. But in larger ships the lower masts are quite solidly and deeply rooted and held by lots of standing rigging, and the upper masts can only be up, down, or stowed completely on deck. Somehow stretching the masts does not also stretch the sail's area The only "unnotching" I can think of is with small craft -- particularly tartanes and barques -- whose masts were often stepped in a "tabernacle" that acted as a giant pivot. And that would lower the whole mast (for trawling or passing under bridges and the like)... that definitely would slow you down! Oh, definitely -- and not just heel. The upper sails on the foremast, and lower sails on the after masts, tend to push a ship's bow down, especially when running with the wind. That will make a ship sluggish. This is why one very often sees ships in art of the period sailing with a fore course, main and mizzen topsail, whatever headsails she carries, and little else -- the fore course and headsails in particular tend to lift the bow and improve handling, which effect can easily be negated by spreading too much canvas higher up. EDIT: Oops, Ryan beat me