maturin

IIRC almost all ships had ensign poles mounted on the taffrail, but these were for harbor service. For ships with a gaff mizzen boom, the pole would need to be removed at sea, and the ensign flown from the gaff. With a loose-footed gaff mizzen or lateen, the ensign pole could remain. However, its presence in paintings may be due to artistic license, who knows.

Daaaaaamn Can anyone make out what those red crossbars on the mainmast are?

And the 'hawsers and cables' required are actually just normal ropes, not eight-inch thick monsters like the actual hawsers and cables.

This increases crafting complexity. So can we nuke the indescribably absurd carriage requirements now, since they were obviously just an anti-inflationary measure to begin with? By weight, cost and labor hours, carriages are like 60% of shipbuilding. That's freaking nuts.

How do you excommunicate a Protestant?

I'm sure the researchers did good work, but their conclusions can only ever be speculation. The idea of a single six-inch shot-hole being ignored for the extravagant amount of time required for the flooding to decisively affect displacement and stability should inspire incredulity, not an 'a-ha!' moment. Pumps were primitive back then, but if one shot hole was all it took, the frequency of founderings in battle would have been overwhelming. And this quote proves that the researchers have not seriously studied stability casualties. Vasa is the very rare exception when a dangerous design shows its teeth immediately. Usually such vessels sail the globe for many years, with cautious and skilled mariners compensating for their defects. Until the luck runs out.

Habana is one of the best looking cities. Map scale doesn't allow for harbors like that.

Seems like whenever anyone makes an 'I quit' thread, they invariably end up going on to make a minor feature request later in the thread. Because the game is tanking, but my pet idea can save it.

Flight sims are already a niche genre that struggle to attract enough players. Now you want to try that model with ships, when the fan base is dozens of times smaller and the knowledge base of fans (and devs) is hundreds of times smaller? How many people know what a trim tab is, versus the number of people who are familiar with catharpings? How many people can be convinced to learn that and a hundred other things before they get to fire their guns?

Go tell it to the captain of the Redouptable, mate.

They already are proper trade vessels, going by rig and design. (Maybe not the Snow.)

Agreed. I have argued as much in great detail several times.

High speed = fast turn, large radiusLow speed = slow turn, small radius With manual sails, anyways. Slow speed rudder-only turns should have large turning radius as well. Ryan confirmed this via PM once upon a time. And of course some ships weren't trimmed right and like to ignore the helm. Many French frigates loved to tack but hated to wear.

This isn't what a bow is shaped like. Look at a model and draw your own conclusions. It's true that the main impact will be above water for both vessels, though. It's my guess that the rammer would suffer from leaks that were impossible to repair on the fly. The bow timbers have very fragile, complex design where they meet the stem. If the victim suffered from crushed planks, the leak could be stopped normally (still much more difficult than with shot holes). But I think the main consequence of ramming should be changed to loss of multiple masts.

Seamanship in the Age of Sail has all the non-vombat commands at the end of each chapter. It even has a lot of terms in other languages.

I heard that a fleet of Constis recently beat a fleet of Third Rates before the recent patch. If so, and the participants were competent, that would be broken.

There is one sort of impromptu razee-ing that would be plausible, and that's cutting off the poop deck or quarterdeck bulwarks to improve weatherliness and stability at the cost of protection from gunfire. Most ships would not be good candidates for this sort of treatment, however.

That's a very strange conclusion to make. Before this patch I never carried goods. I would always teleport. Hunting days have only just begun.

How is this any different than capping a trade vessel near the port that sells those goods? I don't see the advantage here, except for the fact that you attack a defenseless bot in slightly safer waters.

Ships you abandon should sail off with prize crews if they aren't taking on water.

I imagine that priming a wet gun on the quarterdeck would be difficult.

Clans aren't redeemables. But they are very easy to rebuild.

Six Frigates is a good book, of course, but you did specify 'readable.' Not that the language is dense, but IIRC it very much focuses on the institutional background of the early navy, rather than the more exciting aspects of the ships' service. It is long and slightly academic in focus.

If you use free cam to look at the ocean floor, you will see that running aground does coincide with submarine elevation differences. There are plenty of underwater shoals. However the collision is calculated, it coincides with the location of shoals, but not their exact shape. Ships usually run aground with several feet of water still under the keel.

But instances are exactly the same as the OW heightmaps now. They would have to somehow mix the current persistent terrain with procedurally-generated add-on shallows that have different collision mechanics than they do on the OW. I don't have to be a professional game developer to know that that sounds really difficult. Edit: Wait, hang on, am I misunderstanding you, or did you swap your labels? You want shallows to have a limited effect on battles but be relevant on the OW? I don't think that is workable, since the scale of the OW is mostly too large for meaningful localized shallows gameplay. And the time compression and sailing model make it pointless to add obstacles and nuances to the simplified gameplay.