maturin

Just drop Wasa down to 24 pounders on both decks. She needed to use a special kind of short-pattern gun for the main battery, which we don't have in-game. And make her a 3rd Rate. I bet the sailing profile could be narrowed as well, without jettisoning any of the historical data.

Also, well-made two-deckers like Bellona should not suffer too badly from leeway. These were very seaworthy ships that were expected to tack in and out of harbors when conducting a close blockade of Brest. It was the three deckers who were most vulnerable, by far.

Haha, maybe the land should get more solid. Battles in harbors often ended up with a lot of grounded ships IRL. Just another layer of skill required for victory.

Fight! Fight! No idea what film you're talking about, but I'd gladly read an argument about it.

Great, I'm happy to understand how the game calculates leeway. You're simulation is missing one big thing however: http://www.learntocruise.ca/downloads/leeway.pdf Basically, when you are sailing at a broad reach, the sideforce of the sails is converted completely into forward force. This is because the hull goes through the water forward, more easily than sideways. The difference between the force vectors of the sails and the hull's momentum are so close, that they become equal. If you hit a nail with a hammer just a little crooked, the nail still goes down. It ignores the misalignment of the hammerblow, because it is very small. Basically you could turn off leeway for wind angles between 180 and 100, and ship speeds over 3 kts. Leeway is a problem for close-hauled sailing, primarily. I was on autoskipper, so the ship's bow was always pointing in the exact same direction. You're not saying that brigs will sag towards the wind, are you? Any chance we can fix this? A dismasted ship should still drift very slowly.

Haha, I love it. Doesn't matter if you're sailing a dinghy or a battleship. Don't have enough time to build momentum? Spent too long coming about? Leeway is a bitch.

I have Surprise's sailing quality report. It is a low quality scan of the original cursive handwriting and painful to read. "Her draft prevents her from having the qualification of a weatherly ship." Only 14.6 feet of draft, that was her problem. Surprise was designed to run dispatches into shallow Caribbean ports, while sailing downwind in the trades. 'The most she runs before the wind' = "probably" 11 kts Can't remember close-hauled speeds but they are average. Basically, we have Aubrey's Surprise instead. Ships of the line make a lot of leeway because they have so many decks. (The game ignores the side force of the hull itself.) Light vessels are low to the water, which is good. But if they have disproportionately shallow hulls, then the keels do not resist the sideforce. Like Niagara the lake ship, or Mercury who had to operate in the болото Азовское. Or the snow because she is both very shallow AND her keel creates eddies under the boxy hull.

Not necessarily. It is quite easy to build a short frigate that exhibits minimal leeway, or a long frigate that makes considerable leeway. For instance, a short, weatherly British frigate compared to a longer French frigate with shallow draft and hollow lines in the bow. It's a complicated topic, relating to the cross-section area of the hull/keel and the ability of the hull to move through the water efficiently without creating eddies and drag.

Are you so sure of that? This is an image of an LGV making considerable leeway on a broad reach course. Look at the wake for starters. What you can't tell is that I zoomed in as far as possible, then pressed Home to freeze the camera in place. The ship is sagging off to starboard at a considerable rate. https://imgur.com/lUED7LG The existence of leeway is proved by the fact that you can see the ship's port side. The masts are no longer in line. I neglected to get an aerial shot of the wake, when on this point of sail. However, the angle of the wake suggests a similar amount of leeway, compared to a ship sailing close-hauled. I have filed an F11 report concerning this. Close-hauled comparison: https://imgur.com/XwV4qmP

The real Wasa was recorded to make between 0.5 and 1 degree of leeway when sailing close-hauled at 4 knots in a fresh breeze. Just for the record. Other vessels that deserve to make lots of leeway: Niagara Mercury Surprise Rattlesnake Snow (x100500) Santi (x10000000)

Oh, so 2 kts is the actual speed of our drift. I assumed that the speedometer only worked in the Y axis. Restricting it to that axis would eliminate the confusion, but current system is probably fine. By the way, the last remaining tweak is to make ships with no sails also drift downwind at around 1 knot. Then everything will be complete and glorious. Currently I can press T and swivel my yards to eliminate drift entirely. But the hull and masts themselves have enormous surface area, the size of a modern yacht's sail, or more. Harsh, it's true. But sailing close to land should be the scariest thing a captain can experience. If you run aground, you lose the battle. Luckily you can still exit the instance if your friends save you. It seems to me that the rudder is not really necessary anymore, in the final stage of tacking. Which is great. IRL you don't want to rely on it here.

Wasa was built as a small 3rd Rate. If I were a Constitution fan, I would be incensed at the fact that she gets nerfed into oblivion while a ship of the line with the exact same OW-killing stats gets a free pass. So is a Live Oak Consti going to get the same base speed as a Teak Trinco, or is Wasa getting nerfed? Choose one.

Yeah, the knotmeter has some weird quirks now. It tends to jump from +2kts to -2kts when tacking, with no transition period. I think this is due to the fact that the hull is moving sideways, and so the vectors get all weird. Not sure what the issue is with sailing 'while beached,' though. You shouldn't run aground in the first place.

Why not? I see no problem and no difference from how it is in reality? If you make 10 degrees of leeway and need to hit a mark 10 miles distant, you can do some basic trigonometry and find the right course. Most real ships in proper trim are 'ardent' and carry weather helm. Being slack and wanting to fall off is an undesirable trait, and such lee helm is ideally counteracted by the spanker. If you need to sail in a straight line in this game, you use autoskipper. It's only when you are trying to hold position using your yards that this aspect of rudder control becomes an issue. I find that full left/right rudder is just fine for controlling rotation at low speeds, even if you can't ever find equilibrium. Real ships also struggle to maintain perfect control.

That's not how leeway works. Why would you ever need to tap anything? If you want to sail at 80 degrees, you aim at 75 degrees. It's that simple.

Nobody asked, I suppose

Why bother with the Dutch for that matter? They didn't do much in the Caribbean after the 17th Century. If the Dutch are in, there's no reason to omit Sweden and Denmark. Maybe no one remembers, but there was no United States for quite a while either. They were only added because there were some committed American roleplayers back then.

Poland was much more capable of taking over the Caribbean than the pirates were, so go for it. With Jolly Roger lineships, it's already an alternative history game.

/s

It's balanced by the fact that three-decker second rates were the slowest ships afloat. St. Pavel and Bucentaure were the fastest type of SoL, generally speaking. Edit: Wait, Christian VII is huge. Longer than Victory if Three Decks is correct, with a 2nd Rate armament.

That's how 'innocent until proven guilty' works, mate. And then of course there's the common sense angle. It's more likely that the 'victim' had a spontaneous short circuit in his keyboard than that someone was livestreaming their use of the World's Lamest Hack (tm). Do you seriously believe that someone went through all the hard work necessary to hack a different player's ship (many times more difficult than just giving yourself extra HP or speed), in order to create such a worthless, easily countered sail gimmick? What's next, a dastardly hack that changes a player's rolling broadside to random? Also, what about your sig where snitches get stitches?

Are you insane? If we require the playerbase to engage one solitary additional neuron, everyone will instantly quit the game en mass. They have been running at absolute maximum mental capacity for years now. This is one of dozens of minor changes that will drive the population to zero and even lower. Just ask the forums.

The devs didn't create the nations of Poland and Prussia (FFS) in a naval game set in the Americas to give them an equal chance at winning the game of empires. What next, whining that the Aztec faction doesn't get cannons? 'Extremely Hard' difficulty is supposed to mean something.

Now that's the Christmas spirit