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weirdguy

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  1. Actually, you never really sail into such places. You "warp" there. What, warp drive? Like Star Trek? No, the term refers to warping into and out of port by using your ship's rowboats and rows of heavy duty buoys or pylons. You use your rowboats and take a heavy rope, probably your anchor cable (without the anchor) and attach it to a ring or post on the pylon in the river or bay entrance. You then use your ship's capstan or winch to pull you over to it, and repeat the process to get to the next buoy or pylon over and over again until you are out to the end of the line of pylons/buoys, set sail and head off into the open sea. If they don't have a set of buoys or pylons, then you use your ship's anchors to get into and out of tight harbors. Also, using the tides and wind in your favor helps.
  2. The main reason is that there are plenty of other brigs and snows you could do that are actual ocean going vessels instead of small vessels made just for use on one large lake in upstate New York.
  3. I agree with Alex Conner. The Lake Champlain vessels from the war of 1812 are not true ocean capable sailing ships. They're custom built just to work on Lake Champlain. They're not deep ocean craft. They're so shallow draft that they would be unweatherly like you wouldn't believe, and as Alex pointed out they also have barely a cargo space for food and water, which is not a big deal when you are never more than 3 or 4 miles from shore on a freshwater lake. They're great looking, I agree, but my vote is to stay away from the Lake Champlain stuff. They're too specialized and don't fit into the goal of Naval Action. I know what you are trying to say, but actually we're not talking about the Great Lakes, aka Lake Superior, Huron, or Ontario. Those lakes are practically fresh water oceans. I've even seen a US Navy Guided Missile Cruiser docked at Duluth when I was there. Remember that Lake Champlain is just a relatively large, but otherwise normal lake inside New York state. That is another matter. Those vessels are very different, mostly because they have a ridiculously shallow draft.
  4. I can make a good 3D model of a ship for this game. I don't even particularly care if I get paid a lot or not. However, I won't actually start making a 3D model of a ship unless there is an agreement and plan for the 3D model of my ship to actually be used. It is a lot of work to make one of these ships. So far I have heard nothing but rumors that making a 3D model is possible, and that sooner or later there will be an announcement about how 3rd party 3D art guys like me can go about making a ship for the game. Yet, nothing has been said. I'm still not making any 3D models. Is there a plan?
  5. The plans are not in English, so remember that other nations use similar terms in non-similar meanings. For example the French would call a small warship a Corvette, while the British would call it a Sloop-of-War. I've also seen German plans that call a vessel a Fregatte (frigate), yet the British would say it is a small galleon.
  6. 3D studio Max is probably the most common 3D art program there is. Maya is also popular, but it is a professional level program and will take a long time to learn how to use it. I use a program called Anim8or. It has the benefit of being free. It has the disadvantage of being somewhat lacking in some areas, most notably the ability to put straight textures onto things that are curved. Hence the reason I texture objects as flat squares, and then turn those flat squares into ship hulls. I'm completely self taught, by the way. I just play around with it and got better over time.
  7. It has a very wide hull. In real life that would have meant it was very stable and would not heel over as much as other ships when under full sail, but at the same time it wouldn't sail that well. The shallow hull would tend to be blown downwind quite a bit more (called leeway) than a ship that sits deeper in the water. It was probably designed that way for operating in shallower waters like a lot of the Baltic Sea is.
  8. The OP ship is not even close to a ship style built in the 1790's. That is a Dutch style ship from the 1600's.
  9. Because you can pull the two aft side cannons around and then run them out the back. Since that would take the crew a lot of time to do it safely (aka the whole "loose cannon" being a bad thing), it is not something you can do in combat. The only way I could see this is as an option in the customization of a ship. You can either have a full broadside, or sacrifice a pair of guns and have stern chasers, done before you launch into a game. The only reference I have to how this is done was in one of the Horatio Hornblower novels where they first lift the cannon out of it's gun truck and lower it down onto a mat, then move the gun truck to the new location, pull the cannon across the deck using block and tackle, and then hoist the cannon back into the truck after it was secured in place. Any other technique might be too dangerous if the cannon were to roll free (they weigh quite a lot), and if it was to get loose it could go down a hatch and out the bottom, sinking the ship. Thus, the laborious, but safe handling method of using a towing mat.
  10. I might suggest the 1770 Danneborge ship instead. It is a bit more modern looking, and the blueprints are free on the Orlogsbaden website. It is a 60 gun ship of the line, a 3rd rate one in the league of the Bellona.
  11. Norske Løve blueprints can be found on the Orlogsbaden website. However, in a strange twist the older 1734 prints are the more complete set compared to the other Norske Løve from 1764.
  12. For the most part ships like these are NOT done "free-hand". That is to say the artist will not have to guess and make a ship by trial and error. You use a set of engineering blueprints from various books, or websites hosting blueprints of ships. They show the side view of a ship, as well as a front/back half view with the shape of the hull at each rib. Then you just draw the hull lines to match the prints, one rib at a time. Textures are nothing more than .jpg pictures that you "paint" onto any surface of your 3D model. For my own ships I actually paint a wooden hull texture onto a flat rectangle. After that I slice up the rectangle into a grid that lines up with engineering print I have pasted into the background of my 3D program as a reference image. For my program it is just simpler to do that than try to line up curves and such after the hull is made.
  13. Note that the "waterline" of that set of plans is actually all wrong. Most ships have a slight angle to their keel. They sit deeper at the back by the rudder. The artist who drew this vessel has it sitting on the keel, level, and then drew in the waterline parallel with that, which is wrong. You can see in the internal cross section that the deck seems all wrong, but if you were to tilt it properly by about 2 degrees or so, then it works.
  14. Yes, but actually, no. None of the ships in Naval Action have been really old vessels from 1600's or even early 1700's. I think the idea that ships from the earlier part of that time scale would be fine in Naval Action is actually a mistake, and that should be changed. So far I haven't seen Games Labs pick any old ship designs as well. They're pretty much using Napoleonic war era ships. The whole point of a galleon was to have a very high fore and aft ends of the ships to allow for crew to shoot down onto the deck of a smaller warship with their muskets, and even crossbows. Once cannons became more useful with innovations like flintlock firing instead of slow matches, barrels that were honed/machined to a uniform size rather than rough castings, and corned gunpowder in bags rather than meal powder loaded loose from a ladle that sort of design of a galleons elevated fore and aft decks were eliminated. The big cannons took over instead of the old way of using ships as floating infantry forts. The high decks of a galleon only made the ships hard to control (wind hits the hull too), and the later era ships are pretty much just flat decks with much, much larger cannons.
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