maturin

I thought Bellona recently lost her 24-pounders?

It was a crime to make a Baltimore clipper the starter vessel. Now everyone thinks it's banal.

Is that a speedmodded Merc and a vanilla BP?

Correction to my earlier post, after re-consulting my sources: The French actually regarded about 295 (not 250) men to be necessary for tacking or wearing a 74-gun ship under courses, topsails, t'gallants, some staysails and two jibs. However, if you brail up the courses before tacking, by my calculations you can do away over 50 of those men. And of course, brailing up courses is exactly what they usually did in battle. Anyways, I went and found some info on British gun crew sizes. https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1ZlHjd3bbIhthMD8VcYeO9vsmu0JiBIn6hc48d4OWC9U/edit?usp=sharing This source (Nelson's Ships), also shows that the British split their gun crews in halves to fight both broadsides. I scanned two pages of statistics for all these calibers, in case anyone wants the info.

There is a split between trolls and non-trolls then.

Er, no they couldn't obliterate piracy. That's why they chose to try amnesties. Ideally, an amnesty would be a serverwide event just after a great pirate victory of some sort. The best pirate endgame would be to win an amnesty, so that players could actually spend the gold they had plundered.

Trading with impunity was the entire reason vessel like Lynx were developed. The hold space should be utterly miniscule, however.

Pavel is essentially a 2nd Rate because she is an 80-gun ship whose 24-pounders give her greater broadside weight of metal than a British 98-gun three decker.

Yet oddly enough they already had 100-gun ships back then. Anyways, it appears that she was re-armed with 30-pound guns in 1716. So perhaps her lower deck armament should be 32-pdrs in-game. I'd rather see that than overcompensate by making this ship some sort of speed demon.

Yeah, incredible work on the stern. Only 24 guns per battery, though. That's pretty weak.

Wait a minute... Most real Golden Age pirates ended up taking amnesty. How can you be against that?

French gun crew sizes: 36-pdr - 14 men 24-pdr - 13 men 18-pdr - 11 12-pdr - 9 men 8-pdr - 9 men 6-pdr - 5 men 4-pdr - 5 men (Carronades probably have the same crew as 6 and 4-pdrs) This means that a Temeraire-class 74, with 36- and 18-pdrs for main armament, had about 450 men in its gun crews at full complement of 700. Recall that it takes around 250 men to make large sail changes or tack/wear when carrying all plain sail. 450+250=700 Once you take out some of the officers, marines and non-combatants, you might be a little short. But a 74 can still carry out very complex maneuvers while maintaining a high rate of fire on one broadside. Furthermore, those same gun crews can fight both sides at a reduced rate of fire, if well-drilled. One powder monkey can easily supply cartridges for both guns, and all that manpower is only really needed when the gun is being run out or aimed. For the actual action of priming, worming, sponging and loading, you really only need 3-4 men apiece. So the problem is coordination, more than manpower. Now imagine that the ship isn't trying to tack under full sails, but maintaining it's place in the line of battle under topsails, spanker and foretopmast staysail. Your sailhandling requirements have suddenly plummeted. The only operation that requires serious manpower is throwing sails aback when it is necessary to suddenly reduce speed. It's not out of the realm of possibility to send 200 sail handlers below to reinforce the guns (ie, Gunnery Focus). That's an increase of 45%, meaning that each 36-pdr can have 10 men permanently assigned to it, no running back and forth. Furthermore, there are 585 rated seamen in the complement, enough to man the guns and the battle sails without the help of a single marine or petty officer (many petty officers, such as the gunner and his mates, would help fight the ship, of course). Bellona will only have 230 men to handle sails because of her smaller complement. 80-gunners like Pavel and Bucentaure, however, only need 530 of their 850 men (about 65%) to man the guns. A bit of latitude for fighting both sides there, although the sails and yards are bigger.

I'm going to stop you right there. It's not 12 men average. 12 men is pretty much maximum for a gun crew. At least 10 of those guns are carronades or light guns that require less than half as many men. And the officers DO fight the guns. Most of the petty officers have functions that aren't needed in battle, and the midshipmen (in the RN) and some Lieutenants are on the gundecks supervising individual batteries. No one ever said that there were enough men for each gun to have a full crew. But a full complement was capable of fighting both broadsides at a reduced rate of fire, if they were well-trained. That is what we have in-game, where you have to choose between maximum rate of fire and having men to handle sails quickly. There are dozens and dozens of references to ships firing and reloading both broadsides, but you seem to be on some sort of arrogant flatearther power trip in "your" thread, having clearly demonstrated that you don't read sources except when challenged, and prefer to get your knowledge from boardgames. It has nothing to do with logic. No display of 'logic' from you can overcome your ignorance. The professional historians prevail, whether you understand them or not. Jean Boudriot is the world's most renowned historian of the 18th Century French navy. He very clearly lays out how gun crews would go about reloading both broadsides at once (and this by dividing the single crews, without even taking into account the surplus manpower that a full-complement ship would have between one broadside's crews and the other men). Do you think he's... wrong? But you're right?

And if both broadsides need to be fought at once, the second-most senior man in a French gun crew becomes the gun captain for the second gun. Information from Boudriot again. French regulations called for enough men to fight both sides, although this was often not realized, resulting in crews smaller than Naval Action defaults. (A Trinc would have usually carried a crew the size of Renommee's, for instance.) Edit: Now, realistically, what we need is a Reload Priority button. The prioritized broadside should be exempt from Sailing focus and crew loss penalties (as long as we have enough men left to man it fully), while the opposite broadside's reload rate may slow to a crawl depending on situation. This would make it viable to sail around with smaller crews, as we could maneuver just as well, while effectively limiting ourselves to fighting one broadside at a time.

And the British only have one gunner with a few mates, plus midshipmen as gun captains. Does that mean British ships should only be able to fire 12 guns at a time? Gee whiz! I bet everyone will play French now! Do the math: 34 gun crews will be less than 400 men. What is everyone else doing? You either fight one side of the ship and are able to devote many men to maneuvers, or in an intense battle you can take men away from the sails to fight both sides at a reduced level of efficiency. Boudriot (the fellow who wrote that website) even states that a few men from each gun crew can be detached to the opposite broadside to get a head start on reloading it. You don't need a gun captain. Everyone knows what to do. The French just unusual in that they educated their gun captains to be professionals in the craft. But if you are in a melee so intense that you need to fire both broadsides at once, even a blind man will be able to hit the target with no training whatsoever.

What? What are you trying to say? Surely you don't imagine that only 37 men are needed to fire the guns....?

Sure, they would have enough men. On a 74-gun ship, tacking with your courses set requires an extra 58 men. With 293 hands required for the entire operation, that's an increase of 19%. So there would always be enough men, but clearly tacking with your courses and topgallants set would pull even more men from the guns. Basically you would need to be in "sailing mode." I should note that even if you clew up the courses while tacking, you still have to handle all the tacks and sheets. It just won't be simultaneous with all the other parts of the evolution, so you can don't need men dedicated to that task exclusively. And warships never sailed with fewer men by choice, so far as I know. They just couldn't find enough recruits, and in the Napoleonic Wars inevitably had complements that would put us in for steep handling penalties, were it Naval Action.

Clewing up the courses is optional, but you can brace yard with the courses set. It just takes more men and more coordination to drag the sheets and tacks around the deck at the precise moment needed. Slower yard rotation above Battle Sails would be nice, of course.

One look at that wave and you can tell that it's Aivazovsky. This, by the way, is our very own Mercury:

Thanks for that link, De Ruyter. I couldn't remember where I had read that. Anyways, there was also a ship that sailed 800 miles backwards to the Azores, with a broken rudder and a compound fracture in the captain's leg.

The single strongest piece of standing rigging on any vessel is the mainstay, which supports the mast from forward and is thicker than your thigh even on a frigate. You can't be serious. You keep referring to games and models as sources of knowledge. Try reading actual sources on for size, or talking to actual square-rig sailors. A highly authentic replica of a French frigate just crossed the Atlantic, and they didn't risk dismasting every time they tacked.The reason for the Hearts of Oak rule is obvious: it's to prevent unrealistic tactics because the movement rules are simplistic and abstracted. For a turnbased miniature game may be well-researched, but it's hard to imagine a medium less suited to representing the intricacies of shiphandling.

Yes. There's nothing at all dangerous about having your nose in the wind unless it is blowing a gale. In moderate conditions you can tack all day with no risk. Of course, if you are likely to suddenly be taken aback and put in irons, it is probably because of rough weather. Most ships in this game also come with complements that allow them to fight both sides.

You don't usually need to go aloft except to reef or apply/remove gaskets (sail ties). Since the yards don't hoist up and down when we press W/D, the crew are really just hauling on sheets, clewlines and buntlines from the deck.

In battle all the sail changes would be made from deck. It's just the animations that aren't quite accurate.

Crew loss in Boarding focus should also have a tenfold impact on morale, or perhaps reduce preparation.