We're allowing motors, just not fast gun speeds. For those who are sailing-challenged, they would be at a disadvantage on broadsides, but would still be able to mount 'chaser' guns, so they could still score, just not as well. There will be no maximum speed limit under sail, although if you capsize, it should count as a sink (because real ships that ran too much canvas would be effectively hors de combat). Motor speed we'll have to think about. Keep in mind that Carl's piratical vessel is not a full size 1/48 sailing ship, either. Artemis is 4' long or thereabouts, and that's just a 2nd or 3rd rate frigate. If you read a bit on sailing RC sailboats, the bigger you get, the better the ship handles (it gets closer to full scale hydrodynamics). The weight also goes up as you scale, which helps things.
Tugboat's right. Our goal is to make sailing skill a useful bonus, not a requirement for play. An electric motor for propulsion will be allowed, we'll just limit motor-driven speed to maybe 1/2 what you can do under sail alone. Besides that, the basics of square-rigger operations are fairly easy to pick up. I've mostly got the hang of things, I just need to try on a pond with more consistent wind conditions to make sure.
What do you think about allowing a 2-gun chaser armament, Carl? By the time Gascan gets out here to Charleston for training, I'll have Artemis ready for him to learn to sail
I can see some advantages to chase armaments. The one thing I don't want to see is a bunch of sloops and schooners and other purely fore-and-aft vessels running around with chase weapons only. I'd rather strike all sails and run electric than see sloops and schooners take over. One guy in my local club armed all the secondaries on his USS Montana. It's a very impressive broadside. Unfortunately the cannons aren't reloading, so one broadside is all he gets. I think I've mentioned this earlier, but what do you think of the idea of firing multiple Fast Gun cannons using a single high-flow valve like an MJV-2 or JEV-F2F2?
I think that one would need to arm the broadsides before being allowed chase armament. As far as the guns, it'd be worth doing as an experiment. An MJV-2 is only $12, I'll need to see what plumbing would be required to get the gas to 4 cannons. I was planning on fast-gun type cannons anyway. We still need to figure out how to regulate pumps, and how to make the 'auto-strike-the-flag' mechanism discussed earlier. Not worrying about it heavily until my hull is built, but something for the engineering types to think on (or me to think on between giving shots)
Agreed on the broadsides before chase idea. I like the idea of fighting under sail power, and I don't think stern guns (and bow guns) will be quite as useful as broadside guns. I was just browsing on the Clippard website. Although they don't have any fittings intended for 1/8NPT to four 1/16" air nipples, you can probably brew your own with a 1/8NPT plug, drill press, and brass tubing. Another possibility is to daisy-chain MAV-2 valves together. You could probably run them all off a single 4-cu.in. accumulator, since we won't be machine-gunning at six rounds per second. For striking your colors, I am wondering what you would think about having a second, high-powered pump in addition to a regulated, low-powered pump. When this second pump turns on (either manually or automatically), the ship is considered to have struck her colors. Another possibility is to have an amp sensor on the pump, that strikes the colors when the pump approaches its maximum current draw. There's lots of options here.
I hadn't thought about rate of fire; I definately do NOT want fast-gun rates of fire. Maybe 5 seconds? More? Less? I have purchased 5 yards of a tan-colored ripstop nylon for making sails with. I'm going to test the sails with temporary stitching (a la Tugboat), and if they work reasonably, I will bribe my sainted mother to use her $5,000 sewing machine (It's German! Even our sewing machines are Axis!) to do some REAL sewing of the seams. 5 yards of material should be enough for several ships, it was like $4/yd plus shipping.
Well, we could say "four seconds" and get an actual two-second rate of fire, or we could say "two seconds plus an electronic ROF limiter" and get an actual two seconds. It's funny how the whole ROF thing works. You count slowly out loud, "one one-thousand ... eight one-thousand," when outside of combat and the video camera says eight seconds exactly. Count slowly out loud, "one one-thousand ... eight one-thousand" at the same sedate pace, in combat, and the video camera says four seconds. And everyone else applauds you for counting out loud.
I've always been an advocate of ROF timers, I have observed the time distortion problems combat can cause.
If we pick a time delay that Big Gun uses, Strike has fixed-delay timers in the works... For sea trials, I did not intend to mount all the electronics for firing the guns, just the guns and gas system, since the electronics are negligible ballast.Once I can sail the bloody thing, I'll hook up the firing servos and try firing at a target barge. The old fellow who sold me his bandsaw and shaper for a song also threw in some mahogany... what do you guys think: deck planking, or just accents like the rails? It's a really rich, dark brown sample.
Mahogany? That's pretty nice wood. I wouldn't use it for deck planking, though. Then again, I wouldn't hand-plank a deck, anyway. Draw pencil lines, maybe, but there's a whole lot of other stuff to do before you start worrying about a planked deck. I could see planking the bottom of the ship below the penetrable area. Before you really start cutting wood, I think I should link to the main sources of my information on building and operating square-riggers: http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1124958 http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=743611 and of course my own Q&A thread: http://www.rcgroups.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1417997 A four-second rate of fire should be sufficient. Fast enough that you don't miss many opportunities while waiting for your timer to tick down, yet far enough apart that it still is clearly separate broadsides. Plus it's a standard Big Gun ROF so you could get an ROF limiter from Strike Models. OR we could measure the scale speeds and handling on our ships to calculate the time dilation for scale, then work backwards based on known reload times for Napoleonic-era naval guns. Ah, curse my devious mind. I was thinking today about one of the major dangers of a square-rigged sailing ship. That is, the tendency of a square-rigger to bury its bow when running before the wind. This was a major problem on full-size square-riggers. A number of ships were lost when their bows were completely buried by a sudden squall and they literally drove themselves under. Moby Duck herself also demonstrated this distressing habit and would have been lost on several occasions had she not been stuffed to the scuppers with foam. While I was thinking about all that, it occurred to me that if we place minimal restrictions on structures below the waterline, what is to prevent a performance-seeking skipper from adding a hydrofoil to the bow of his ship, to counteract the downward forces of the sails? If we allow small electric motors for propulsion, what is to prevent a performance-seeking skipper from mounting two motors like a V-22 Osprey tilt-rotor aircraft, to lift the bow and/or actively counter the ship's heel? I'm not quite sure what to think. On the one hand, it could make our ships that much safer and more capable. On the other hand, it provides a potentially huge and horribly non-scale performance boost to those skippers with the money and technical capability to pull it off. Thoughts?
I would say that the motor issue is easy; write the rule to exclude anything but a single motor pointed directly astern, no larger than a 380 size, no large than a half-inch prop, and no faster than X seconds per 100 feet when running only on the motor. For the keel, the rule could be such that it does not allow any control surfaces apart from the main vertical shafting that holds the weight to the hull, and only a single keel. That rules out rudders on the keel, and planes for preventing pitching. I believe that a good bit of the pitching problems you had with Moby Duck will be mitigated by building in 1/48 scale. We will see shortly.
Seems like it! Except, there's no actual rule YET. The only one of us sailing at the moment is Carl; my frigate is weeks from sea trials. If you build a ship and test it with a winged keel, go for it. But I've been cruising the model sailing sites and the ships that are comparable in size to what we're proposing (square-rigged frigates mostly between 4-5 feet long) sail nicely without much more than a (~1 foot) deep bulb keel, even under full sail. I will post some pics of Minerva* this weekend. I have the wood, I have the epoxy. just got to get cutting and gluing. The ripstop nylon for the sails won't get here for a few weeks, but if I'm ready to sail before then I'll do it with plastic supermarket bags (not really, I have some tyvek sheet I can use in a pinch) *used to be Artemis, but I like Minerva better
Going over to pick up the bandsaw at 10:30 tomorrow morning; will post pics of it's handiwork tomorrow night. Should cut ribs much faster than the trusty jigsaw!
Work finished early today so I went on a sailing spree Since I had more time, I visited a new pond today in search of better winds. The new pond worked out great! I had so much fun I sailed until the transmitter battery ran out I also dropped my camera in the water ran over a fish and ALMOST circumnavigated the entire pond The new pond is called Elles pond in the Los Gatos Creek Park, in Campbell, California. It's a semi-rectangular pond roughly 300m by 400m with the long direction running north-south, and hiking trails all around. Winds blow mostly from the north, sometimes shifting to come from the east. I don't know how to estimate wind speeds, but I would describe it as topgallant weather. I started off with courses and topsails, but soon added more sails. I debated adding just the topgallants, but decided I wanted some pictures with the royals set and for the most part it worked out great. I launched from the northeast corner, and mostly sailed around there for a half hour while I took pictures. There was lots of tacking and gybing, chasing off a couple of piratical geese, and generally doing all those things that model square-riggers do. I soon discovered why sitting on a sloped shore while trying to tack AND take pictures is a bad idea. Moby Duck had been beating upwind for a bit and I wanted a photo of her partway through tacking. I missed stays then fumbled the camera while trying to recover. It slid down the embankment, then dropped about a meter onto the shore and bounced into the water. My ship went "hands-off" while I skidded after the camera, and stayed like that for a minute while I popped out the batteries and memory card. RIP, good old Canon A-610. You were a good camera in your time. Survived two sinkings and a cannonball, but this time it was too late. I think my next camera will have "waterproof and shockproof" as the #1 requirement. After the disaster with the camera, I was no longer limited to sitting down on the shore. So I set myself the goal of circumnavigating the pond. I knew I could tack and gybe and the Duck sails upwind remarkably well, as long as there is a wind to sail against. The downwind leg of the voyage went quite well. I zig-zagged south along the eastern shore, broad reaching to see how fast I could go. It was most impressive: I estimate that at full power, the duck could match or possibly even catch many of the battleships in the Western Warship Combat Club. That is, of course, on a beam reach with a stiff breeze blowing. Most of the time, though, even my sluggardly old dreadnought SMS Viribus Unitis could get away by pointing upwind. At one point Moby Duck suddenly jerked to a halt, then something silvery splashed right next to the ship and darted away into the depths. I can only assume that I ran into a fish, and the fish protested. The wind got stronger the further down I went, so about 3/4 of the way down I pulled her into a sheltered bay and lowered the royals and topgallants. I then set out on the southern leg of the journey. The wind picked up so much during the southern leg that I could only gybe, and I did have to sail around several fishermen on a pier and avoid their lines, but soon the west shore was in sight and it was time to point into the wind. I discovered that in heavy winds, two jibs is too much, and I had a lot of trouble keeping her bow into the wind. After a few minutes of suffering, I pulled her ashore again and took down the inner jib (what do you call them when there's only two jibs instead of three?) and things went much better. I got a good 75 meters upwind when it started to die. I headed ashore to set topgallants, but the wind completely died during the process. I knew the park was going to close but I didn't know when, so after waiting a bit for the wind I started the long hike back to the car. I was almost to the north shore again when the wind suddenly reappeared. Tired of carrying my ship, I finished setting the gallants and sent her eastward. There were fishermen at intervals along the north shore, so I had to keep about 15 to 25 meters off shore to avoid getting hit by "cannonballs" or snared in fishing line. The wind shifted to blowing from the northeast, so heading eastward was a difficult task. I got about 100 meters when the wind died, leaving me becalmed. Waves were pushing Moby Duck away from me and out to the middle of the pond, and I was expecting the park ranger to come by at any time to lock the gates to the park. I resorted to wiggling the rudder back and forth, fish-tailing the ship around to try and get ashore. By this time it was starting to get dark, then I looked down and noticed my transmitter's analog power gauge reading 60%, far below the red line and dropping fast. Fortunately right at that moment a tiny breath of wind came from the east and pushed the Duck to shore before vanishing again. I collected my ship and powered her off just as the power gauge passed 30%, then marched back to my car singing "safe and sound and home at last; let the waters roar, Jack!" Afterwards, I stopped by the hobby shop for some paint and a few other parts, and a hardware store for a folding fireplace thingie that I will turn into a boat stand. Then it was back home again to "Drunken Sailor", "Jamestown Homeward Bound", and other sea chanties.
Just to give you an idea what I'm talking about, here is an example of Moby Duck getting driven under by a gust while running. omg GUST! notice how little speed she has when buried. About 15 seconds liater. With the gust dying, her bow lifts back up. Notice the difference in speed now that she's not buried. And the gust is completely past. Still slightly down in the bow due to wind, but no longer in real danger: Over time I have been shifting ballast aft. Today I replaced a couple 6oz weights with 8oz weights, bringing total ballast up to 2lbs8oz and moving aft. Anyway, now you know what to look for, Tugboat. If your ship does this too, we really may want to experiment with bow-mounted hydrofoils. I don't think adding wings to the main keel will help. If we do need to do something, it would work best all the way in the bow.
Awesome sea story, Carl Inspiring too, although I note with sadness the passing of your valiant camera. It gave it's life nobly and there is no shame in that. If the larger ships have issues with ducking, we may have to look at hydrofoils (or Australia II-style winged keels). I found some useful advice about ballasting a square-rigger on this page I found thru RCGroups: http://pages.swcp.com/usvmyg/squarerig/sq1.htm (Boyle says that it's best to ballast so you're stern-heavy. Obviously we don't want to do it so much that we compromise on scale, but I think it'll help with the ducking.
