maturin

Portland, ME I worked at a marina that currently occupies the shipyard where the famous clipper Snow Squall was built.

As I recall the foretopmast staysail appears about the same time as the fore and maintopsails when you go from Full Stop to Dead Slow. AFAIK ships only ghost along on fore staysails when they are pulling away from an anchorage, barely at steerage way. Or perhaps to control rotation while drifting with the tide or settings topsails. Because if you want to go anywhere fast, you need the topsails set. By hoisting yards, I meant the fact that topsail and topgallant yards need to be raised from the caps to their respective mastheads. In the game they are always fixed at the latter position, which means the sails are just being clewed up and down.

No one will vote to end it, though. Not when we have to grind damage.

Млечный путь изобрели и установили британские ученые Ост-Индской компании в 1742-г.

Translation: 'I don't understand what on earth the OP is about, therefore it must be some sort of dangerous witchcraft.' Sorry for the snark, but your post irritates me. There is almost always a valid debate to be had on whether realism in a given feature conflicts makes gameplay too convoluted or difficult. But this really is not such a case. 1. We are talking about hidden stats governing vessel control, no more and no less. You can be a farmhand from Iowa who doesn't know a rudder from a rodeo and still play the game just the same. 2. These are features that add considerable value for people who are familiar with and passionate about sailing vessels. It will make the ships look and act more convincing, while providing the attentive player with advantages he can use. Therefore it fits the axiom of 'simple to learn, easy to master,' all without adding any new procedures, skills, buttons, UI, etc. 3. The example of PotBS argues for my proposal here. Ships in that game had many semi-magical properties, a host of different stats that determined their performance. By comparison, Naval Action's vessels seem to have fewer discrete characteristics. Coupled with the likely absence of the all-important outfittings, this game's ships will suffer from predictability and same-iness unless ideas like mine are implemented. This is thus not just a realism issue, but a requirement for having interesting and varied vessels. 4. While implementing these vessel characteristics requires a lot of work upfront, it is in no way taxing or difficult to manage as a system. It is literally as simple as giving each class of vessel a stat, and defining a range of +/- 2-15%. That's a single set of dice rolls, one time, when the ship is built. No bearing on the CPU at all. Almost every RPG-type MMO crunches far more numbers that that.

Yeah, they could even keep the speeds more or less the same if we could get the clews of the sail drawn in towards the middle quarter of the yard, instead of just running up like a Venetian blind.

Sorry, I can't seem to divine your meaning here. Are you talking about square riggers and staysails? What do you mean by sails hoisted 'in the regular manner?' Hoisting yards?

I think you admit that Point 1 is just wrong, so let's move on to the other two.Unless you provide some specifics, I can't see what you are referring to. You trim a full-rigged ship for upwind or downwind sailing by setting or dousing the right sails. The most important factor here is hull shape. The masts and spars of 18th Century warships are arranged based on standardized formulas, without any clear tradeoffs between maneuverability and speed that I know of. The most you can do historically is shift a mast slightly, or re-size a yard. And I have never heard of ships being built specifically for fast turning, which appears to be a modern videogame and aviation concept. Speed was prized in both frigates and and 74s. Feel free to post any examples to the contrary thst you have. But unless you come back with some actual technical explanations or statements by good sources, I can't regard your claims very highly. Edit: Brigand, your link there was very unexpected. Cheers

Great post, Crankey. People around the forum do in fact need convincing that these aren't like their fiberglass daysailers.

Did you just make all of that up...?

I have just discovered a trove of summarized Sailing Quality Reports for dozens of French frigates. This information is gold, telling us what characteristics contemporary captains and architects considered most important. It can also guide the devs when they create stats for ships. For instance, one major takeaway is that when a ship is unusually fast on a given point of sail, another point of sail often suffers. A fast upwind sailer is poor downwind, or vice versa. If you are at all interested in vessel performance, you need to read this. Here is everything I have found so far. I'd love to start a real conversation around this, and would happily write a glossary if need be, but the scale of the info dump makes that difficult to accomplish. If any devs are interested, I could try and synthesize this information into something more readable and actionable. http://imgur.com/a/LRzbO Source: History of the French Frigate, 1650-1850

There can ALWAYS be fog. In fact, for most of videogame history large gamespaces have been impossible without liberal quantities of concealing fog. Weather systems that roll in looking convincing are more challenging, but still.

I don't know what you were doing wrong, but my team once captured a Bellona in a few cutters and brigs. A single snow can easily knock all ST's stern armor off.

Unless the opposing team has also read the guide, and pulls to leeward, shooting at masts. The guide admits that this meta is practically unbeatable. So the admiral needs to engage in a game of chicken, feinting to leeward in order to make his opponent mirror the move, then stealing the wind with the smallest possible margin of error.

HMS Laryngitis? HMS Moist? HMS Hilariously?

I think you guys underestimate the importance of this. Or not importance perse, just that camera and perspective are a fundamental part of core gameplay. It's the sort of stuff you should get nailed down early, and not be tinkering with in the middle of development. Because of the lackluster view modes we have now, players spend half of their time as a disembodied floating head in gunnery mode. And the other half is on maximum zoom, awkwardly trying to swivel the camera around your own vessel to see where the enemy is. A masthead view would be infinitely superior to the latter perspective, and very immersive. And with ghost sails, a fighting top position is better than the zoomed-out view we have now. The developers initially wanted to restrict the camera to the vessel, with no isometric PotBS-style perspective, and I wish they had stuck to their guns. It's probably late for that, but they can still deliver viable alternatives to those who care about immersion.

We also need hotkeys for masthead and fighting top views, so we can feel like a member of the crew. These should be static view points that rotate around a fixed point like Google street view. If we don't get this soon, I'll honestly be rather baffled.

Yeah, you should have posted a photo of the US Capitol Building.

I don't think the French would have won if they had aimed at the hull, do you? On rare occasions where French gunners had the necessary experience, shooting for the rigging was a very successful tactic, resulting in a disabled British fleet that was helpless to prevent the French from achieving their goals. There is an excellent essay about British triumphalism and the question of the weather gauge, with an example of the French leeward position paying dividends, but I can't find it. Edit: Of course, the French never did 'kite.' They fired from leeward at effective range. No silly S-curves to keep out of reach of British guns.

If mast repairs didn't illogically deprive us of hull repairs (effectively reducing our ability to take damage by 100%), this wouldn't be such a problem. I can certainly see armor rating for lower mast sections as justified. 9 and 12 pounders should barely dent a 3-foot-thick mast at long range. Upper mast sections, especially topgallant masts, should be very weak. But it's rather unusual to hit these masts anyhow.

That would be like a mast made out of brick.

Is it even possible to find these in English? Amazon and the library system here has got nothing. Any ideas? I'm not about online PDFs, either. If they wanted me to buy them, they would sell them.

Low freeboard does help a lot with windward performance. That's why 'clipper-built' vessels are so low and dangerous. But if we are talking about sailing to windward in fresh weather, with a head sea running, the large vessel will soon develop a strong advantage, being less affected by the waves. A smaller vessel will be forced to shorten sail or bear off much sooner. There is also the question of length, although I'm not really clear on that point.

Just another random idea for testing Damage Model 4.0. Give us a testing room where we can go 1 v 1 with a stationary AI vessel that doesn't shoot back. No credit in damage to be earned, of course. In ArmA I helped de-bug tank damage models all the time, and would just place friendly tanks down on a runway to hit them in different places with rockets and auto-cannons.

Anyone in the fleet can come up with a strategy and coral players. But the heaviest ship really does need to be at the head of the line (scouting/harassing frigates aside) making split-second tactical decisions. Otherwise your side will lose. Only the head ship knows what kind of shot he has loaded, where the reload timers are, how many leaks are in the hold, how many repairs he has left. He gets fired on the most. And if he needs to switch tacks, or see the opposition getting ready steal the wind, he can't be waiting for any little admiral leading from behind.