tater

Health bars are weak. "I'll not fire at him right now, as he's a heartbeat from sinking, I'll shift fire to that fresh ship that I have not even seen int he last 10 minutes through the smoke because I magically know he's fresh."

That's always true for YOU, the dev in this game The rest of us have no need to know via a health bar. WW2OL has no health bar for vehicles. Your tank has holes shot in it, and components may be damaged. You can be hit 10000 times by small arms, as they do no meaningful damage to a tank (of sufficient armor thickness), but the first AT shot might hit the ammo or fuel, and the tank brews up in one hit. There are virtually no "instant kill" hits on an age of sail ship. You'd see masts coming down, holes, etc.

10 minutes would have been epically shot for an enemy to strike, much less sink.

Any damage system where you know if you take X hit you'll sink is gamey.

I agree that experts could read a lot about the enemy by actions, and the way their movement "felt" to see. I mean hard to read in the game sense. Holes in the hull show. Sails holes, masts down, etc. It will be tough with just visual cues, but having too much information (the % damage number on some sort of dumb health bar) is just as bad. I agree completely with damage reports from your officers and crew. Reports from your crew on the state of the enemy as long as it is something they could know is fine. Best way would be to have such information ranked based on it being easily visible, or something experienced eyes see, then use the skill level of the crew (including your captain) to decide if you get informed. I don't want a health bar even for my own ship. "2 feet in the bilge, sir! We're pumping, but one of the chain pumps was destroyed." "The carpenter reports he's patching 2 holes between wind and water, sir." That's what I want to see.

New Principles of Gunnery https://archive.org/details/newprinciplesgu00wilsgoog 1805 reprint of 1742 work. The author invented the ballistic pendulum to measure shot velocities. The 2d preface is 1760s. he specifically mentions 24lbers with 1700 feet per second MVs (might be heavy powder charge). Later, in a letter to Anson, he says that their (naval guns) can be assumed to have velocities in the 1100 to 1200 feet per second range (around pg 305 of actual book, 356 or something in the digital page number, bottom)).

https://archive.org/stream/atreatiseonnava01douggoog#page/n8/mode/2up 1855, so again, after our period, but has some useful information as it recounts various engagements within our period as examples. Page 123+ has very specific damage and penetration examples. Based on the French penetration data (check Appendix D at the back), even 36lber french guns only just exceed 2 feet penetration at 1094 yards. That's not enough to penetrate a SOL. http://books.google.com/books?id=5hpVAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA308&lpg=PA308&dq=naval+gunnery+sail&source=bl&ots=0yln5sBW7g&sig=B7P10meDyFbksYZXyQVd5TmurI0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=hDEeU43WE8eEyAHi3YCgBg&ved=0CGEQ6AEwCA#v=onepage&q=naval%20gunnery%20sail&f=false ^^^ 1820 version WRT long vs short guns, his work is clear. The point of long guns is increased Point Blank range, since he says that is the only range where really accurate fire is possible.

http://www.thenrg.org/resources/articles/The%20carronade.pdf I did not see reference in this to the fact that carronades fired hollow shot. The lower powder charge was possible due to less windage (the ball fits tightly in the gun, increasing pressure). Range is described in this paper as shorter than long guns, but other docs I have read shows this to be a myth in absolutely terms of how far you can throw a ball. Lower effective range might be more plausible, as the lighter shot still has the drag of the heavier shot, without the momentum. (drag goes as the square of the velocity, momentum is linear with mass and velocity). That said, I have seen both hollow and normal shot mentioned WRT carronades, so I have no real idea which account is correct, or if both were used. What I do gather, is that the goal was to hit the enemy with just enough velocity to penetrate without over-penetrating. Spalling wood, basically, to make a jagged hole, not a clean one.

http://books.google.com/books?id=T9BMAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA158&lpg=PA158&dq=admiralty+1813+point+blank+cannon&source=bl&ots=X7xOtkfDjB&sig=NuWfRKsGNFNyUtEhtqrKiMUiJuM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=o_kdU9rHC-LCyQGEwICIDw&ved=0CCgQ6AEwATgK#v=onepage&q=admiralty%201813%20point%20blank%20cannon&f=false From 1830, but instructive to read the whole article, even if it is about a gun system that is after our time period. He briefly mentions something that is often forgotten. The ship is always not only rolling, but pitching. At the moment the gun is fired, you have the aim, say, dead level on the roll (you have super skilled gunners), but the pitch still matters. At point blank range, with a skimming shot, pitch is sort of removed from the equation, but with longer ranged shots, pitch comes into its own to spoil accurate fire.

Spritsails were taken in for battle as they impeded visibility forward so much. Obviously players can control sails as they please, but the variation from bare poles to all plain sail is sort of jarring. When roll is in, presumably people would reduce to fighting sail to mitigate heel and dampen roll---for the purposes of more accurate gunnery.

Damage would be very hard to read from one ship to another. Even crew would be hard to see, particularly given the smoke that will likely not be as persistent in game. Blood in the scuppers is not a terrible idea, and in fact a small amount of blood turns a great deal of water red though, so a tint to it would indicate someone was wounded, past that? <shrug> If the damage is not a generic texture, but holes where balls enter… count the holes. Really, just get a sense of "a lot" or "few." The less information the better, frankly.

Guns had to be manhandled, so yeah, Really, gunnery needs to not be terribly accurate. There is a reason RN tactics went back towards the 17th century notion of melee, as in line fleet engagements tended to be indecisive. I've been reading up more on gunnery (wife is out of town at a meeting, so it was books and beer last night ), and read a few things that belong here. In the late 1700s (1779, I think), they changed the gun tackle to allow guns to point +-4 points from abeam. That's 46 degrees forward, and 46 degrees astern. Most games seem to have speeds too high, and far too much sail up during combat. There were a number of reasons topsails were the norm for combat, all mentioned in places in the forums. Fire hazard, heel, and speed denigrating gunnery to the point of being nearly ineffective (read this last night). The last point is that the roll becomes completely unpredictable if the ship is at speed. She'll roll and pitch, and with a press of sail will heel. This can make just being around the guns very dangerous (to the point they'd need to be secured as for a storm). From Fighting at Sea in the 18th Century by Willis (go buy this excellent book, right now! ): Their (RN) rule of thumb was to not be more than 600' from the enemy in fleet actions, and closer was OK, but not too close (sometimes they were tangled together, but this risked fire, etc). For a single ship, within half a cable (50 yards). The idea of the player shooting all the guns lacks nuance as well... Admiral Parker's fleet orders in 1797: Every game seems to have all the guns loaded the same.

If you shorten sail, does heel lessen/disappear? (it should, according to Willis (great book).

I was reading Willis last night, and he makes some points that illuminate something we always see, but I did not understand fully until last night. You see "fighting sail," meaning the sails set for action, and it ins invariably topsails, with the mainsails furled. The latter was partially to prevent damage and fire. The topsails act as a damper for ROLL. A slow, predictable roll made gunnery far easier. A press of sail means that the ship will roll even less---but she will heel more. This is where realism is so great from a game design standpoint. Choices, checks and balances. Sail with a lot of canvass aloft, and you will likely heel the ship, which can limit some gun ports from opening (weather gage), or the ability to aim due to limited depression of guns (lee side). You also get to go faster (depending on wind). Moderate your canvas to "fighting sail" of topsails, and you slow down, but the roll is still dampened a fair bit, and heel far less unless the breeze is really stiff. Heel on large ships under topsails is probably going to be very small (which explains why this was the standard, along with station keeping). Bare poles would have basically no heel, but roll would be nasty. Dunno about sprung anchors vs a single anchor. The latter would certainly be rolling a lot, unsure about an anchor with a spring on it (you could set some topsails to dampen roll perhaps, but hove to? Ryan?). Is the dampening of roll due to sails coded? Basically you'd look at the moment at the midpoint of the set sail, and treat the velocity of the sail at that point due to roll is an apparent wind opposite the roll.

I assume since you are doing the physics of the balls in flight, the dispersion is strictly gun related, and the roll (combined with some random delay in firing due to the delay in firing all muzzle loaders) will give even more variability. You might add a crew-based "dispersion" (not technically dispersion, I know) based on the quality of the gunner's aim. With any heel of the ship that was constant (say the shooter is close-hauled and heeling), the quoins would be placed such that the gun was aimed dead horizontal without roll. Not horizontal to the deck, but to the "flat" sea (we will call the sea a a plane at the distances involved here, not the surface of an oblate sphere that it is). With some exceptions, range was not considered much. Skim the balls over the waves. A slight increase if your goal was the rigging, that's it. Heeling would only really be a big issue in a chase where the ships had to have a press of sail for some reason. Once reason ships used reduced sail in combat was that heel is entirely controllable in any weather short of winds that will heel the ship on bare poles. Reduce sail. It's perfect to have heeling matter, but it should be clear that all a player need do to remove heel is to reduce sail. Too much concentration on aiming might overwhelm people, frankly. Ranging shots, and nitty gritty aiming would really be best for a chase action, where you get the long chase guns out, and fire single, aimed shots, which would be super fun. I'll keep an eye out for any data on hot guns exploding. Seems like that is almost too rare for consideration. The other possibility is disused guns on old merchants exploding simply due to pressure (they loaded the thing 2 years ago, and the ball is now stuck so powerfully that the gun will explode if it is fired) . Guns of this era did not have good sights (some were fitted by a few captains late in the age of sail). They were roughly pointed, and the elevation was done to level the gun to the sea in the large majority of cases (maybe chase guns excepted). As the ship rolled, at point blank range (where the majority of firing should occur, else be pretty ineffective), you fire when the line of metal is pointed at the target location. No stabilized head, that aim should be like you are bolted to the gun. They were stuck aiming to actually fire looking down the SIDE of the gun, and standing behind the gun would get you killed, too, so aim is pretty imprecise, I'd say. Distance to target data… a guess at best. An educated guess, but a guess. Better than some range in meters might be "pistolshot," "half a cable," "one cable," "point blank," etc. There is no way they know the range any better than maybe 10 yard/meter precision, and even that is how they'd express the range, not what they'd actually know. Firing a lone gun with a given powder charge they might get the range. In a battle situation? Not gonna happen I think. They do not set the elevation of the gun to a range like land artillery. Firing at range made hitting nearly impossible. They wanted the ball to never exceed the height of the hull of the target in flight, basically---or the masts for dismasting aim was the goal. So if the trajectory goes over about 100 feet, not so good. The no aiming lines and no distance should be the goal. It was likely hard because they were sooting from too far. I'd say that many shots should hit at a couple cable lengths (~600m), past that, yeah, it should be hard. If you make aiming too easy, then you need to have unrealistically low damage I think. The reality is that many shots will do little meaningful damage (they'll blow holes in the ship or sails, and kill anyone they happen to hit directly). Only the shots that hit something important really do a lot of damage (guns, tackle, masts, etc). There were ships hit where many hundreds of balls hit them that stayed a float, and even won the fight they were in. That's as it should be. Waves (roll) should be really important, and it drives the tactics that should dominate. Early on, battles were melees, with ships smashed together. Line tactics evolved, but most such engagements turned out to be inconclusive. Later engagements were Nelson style (back to getting alongside and battering) and produced definitive results. I think the reality of having inaccurate fire drives that. If it is too easy to hit at range, it makes it really difficult for escape to be possible, for example (useful for merchants). It also makes maneuver less important, because you need only get to 1000 yards or so, then start shooting. In reality I think that at 1000 yards a majority of shots should in fact miss assuming any sort of wave action (changes to elevation due to roll might exceed every other factor by a large margin). Perhaps a large majority. Smoke would quickly make specific aiming really difficult as well. Making shooting "hard" (that is to say "inaccurate") is great for gameplay, IMHO. Loads of shooting, not as much damage. If you want to put the ship alongside at pistol shot, you cannot miss.