maturin

Limiting OW Home camera to slowest speed would be a great compromise. If you're going to take away the Home Camera on the OW, then less-crappy camera perspectives must be added fast. Masthead view, quarterdeck view, etc.

Didn't they promise a month's warning? If there's no information, then it won't happen for at least a month.

Still a better mod than Twilight Fireship.

That's because lots of crews were just terrible. Everyone starts with the crew of the Shannon in this game, so making them even better is problematic.

That sort of situation warrants hotfixing out AoE damage entirely.

This. Some of those bonuses just reek of magic. And Determined Defender will revolutionize everything.

Craftable cannons are a natural extension of the crafting system, especially since the carriages are an infamous plague that needs to be eradicated. When it comes to expanding hold space of warships, crew size should be the most important factor. Ideally we would have a Crew/Cargo slider and Guns/Cargo slider. The Guns slider would partially arm gundecks (allowing 2-18 carronades on a trader's brig, for example). A ship could carry a full battery of guns without sacrificing too much cargo space, but with a reload rate penalty (since the gundeck would be encumbered with cargo) and limited ammunition. Merchant vessels should be divided into two types: Merchantmen that are essentially just warships without guns, and more than capable of fighting if converted. Vessels with capacious hullforms that sacrifice speed, particularly to windward (effected by a Trim choice at the crafting stage). As for cargo's effect on speed, it would be unrealistic to handle this by percentage. Ships were designed to carry heavy loads, and were often unsafe if too light. So performance penalties should only come in once a ship surpasses 70-80% of total capacity, with a different threshold for each vessel. Speed penalties for overloading would affect downwind performance more than upwind sailing.

As a sailor you can look at your sails and immediately tell what tack you're on. This will verify how the wind indicator works. If you are not a sailor and cannot read the sails, then you are helpless.

Luckily we can just log off afterwards.

Are you a confused real-life sailor? I sail, and I don't have to rely on the little tail of the arrow to see where the wind direction is. I don't see an arrow, I just see a line. And it's always obvious which end is which. If you get disoriented by a full 180 degrees without this arrow, then you have major situational awareness issues. I think real sailors might be annoyed by the failure to follow convention, but they can figure it out. It's non-sailors who would be confused by the authentic arrow, if anyone.

I think you are speaking from your experience with small marconi-rigged yachts here. It takes a hell of a lot of wind to put a large square rigger at risk of broaching, and they have nothing to fear from a beam wind. The ships do have polar diagrams, with proper reductions in speed for sailing with the wind aft. Many historical square riggers did just as well with the wind after as they did sailing large, however. There is no apparent wind in the game, to keep things simpler from a gameplay and programming standpoint. And apparent wind is less important for a large heavy warship than it is for a racing or cruising yacht. In light air conditions where the discrepancy between apparent and real wind is large, these ships wouldn't be going anywhere fast anyhow. A modern sailboat might use light airs to sail close-hauled and get a boost from apparent wind, but a square rigger wouldn't be able to build up enough speed to do the same. And sailing slowly to windward with square sails and a large hull results in loads of leeway. I'm not sure about the feasibility of shaders. But I remember calling for luff/flogging sound effects back in 2014. BTW, the sails do go slack and come aback properly. The by-the-wind angles are just exaggerated to keep things playable.

A fellow Portlander, I see. I'm about to take a tiny lugsail-rigged dinghy out and say good morning to her.

I really don't recommend learning lessons from zombie fiction. Explosives cause about 80% of casualties through shrapnel, whether we're talking about terrorist bombs or military ordinance. And in the case of black powder, it's a low explosive. It just deflagrates. There's not much point paying attention to shock waves. Edit: AKD beat me.

Given similar vessels, small differences in sail area mean little. For every given vessel, there is an ideal amount of sail area for the weather conditions and circumstances. Sail area (rig size) was determined by formulas, and these formulas often produced poor results because of vagaries of hullform and trim. Less could be more. This can be seen by the fact that sometimes frigates suffered damage to spars, only to sail faster under their jury rig than they did under full sail.

Mythbusters is a TV show. Their 'myth' was based on false premises in two ways.

This isn't a 'point.' The author has no point. You can't prove what caused the disparity in casualties, when dozens of evenly-matched frigate duels showed the same disparity. Just to clarify: I'm aware that Constitution ended several fights with 18-pdr shot embedded in her hull as partial penetrations. 18-pdrs are more than capable of penetrating 21 inches of live oak and white oak at normal engagement ranges, so this was likely due to double or even treble-shotting guns with reduced powder charges. In other words, as soon as the British learned to charge their guns properly, the 'armored battleship' label would vanish. It would, however, be interesting to speculate on the advantage to be had when your thick hull forces an opponent is required to fully charge their guns in close combat. Besides the inability to use double shot, the larger powder charges would probably reduce their rate of fire as they overheated at a faster rate.

Not this silliness again. Most engagements between British and French frigates had the same lopsided casualty ratios, despite the fact that the caliber of the guns and the construction of the ships was functionally identical. If you put more rounds on target than your opponent, you will cause more casualties. And if the rounds penetrate, they will cause casualties. When it comes to creating splinters, penetrating a 21-inch hull (with an 18-pounder can do easily) is even better than penetrating a 14- or 6-inch hull. Facepalm at the 'armored battleships' remark. How can you build the 'first battleship' when battleships have been in existence for centuries? How can you build the first 'armored' ship by creating a hull only marginally stronger than those of aforementioned battleships?

A major example or the only example? Have you ever heard of others? To state the obvious, Bonnet wasn't a pirate when he contracted to have his ship built. He was a wealthy man living on the civilized mainland within the confines of the law.

You've seen the 32-pdr carronades shooting holes through a model of Niagara, right? The splinters penetrated an inch of plywood. And one six-inch ball would create a cloud of splinters that could cover an area fifty times greater than the trajectory of the ball.

Sounds good. I would play pirate.

USS Independence has a greater burthen tonnage than HMS Victory. So the US could build First Rates. Oh, and AFAIK Caribbean pirates never built so much as a rowboat.

US had capability to build SoLs and did so. Pirates did not. Topic over?

Fireship mods should reduce crew by 90% and take you down to 1 dura.

Heat maps are supposed to cover a long period of time, right?

Can we please call it Maximum Charge or Extra Charge? Double charge = shards of barrel and gun carriage flying everywhere.