Gah. Got zero done, but I'm off tomorrow. Brian K reminded me that we have a 1 day battle this coming sunday, and Lutzie was still looking suspiciously un-sheeted, and might have been missing a pump. So that got done, along with re-mounting the bandsaw blade, fixing the tracking, and adjusting the upper and lower blade guides. All while I-boat driver Stephan and Bayern driver Christopher earned $20 EACH to climb into my stinky smelly test basin to scrub the walls and remove large quantities of leaves so that the test basin might once more be called a pool. Productive, but Minerva awaits! The newly-adjusted bandsaw now cuts cleanly and true, and really really fast, so Minerva ribs will be happening tomorrow.
Excellent! A well-tuned bandsaw makes quick work of building a hull. I attempted once more to circumnavigate the pond today. The crew ran out of supplies 1/3 of the way into the return journey (dead receiver battery). I noticed when Moby Duck started missing stays because her crew took too long to brace the yards around. Then came a terrifying 15 minutes trying to get her to shore, not into that big mess of reeds on the downwind corner of the pond... I also tried out one of these: http://www3.towerhobbies.com/cgi-bin/wti0001p?&I=LXCPW5&P=FR I hung it underneath the rudder, to help get around when completely becalmed. And indeed becalmed is the only time it will help, because it is so slow. With a single 1.5v alkaline battery, the boat crawls along when becalmed. The ship would go faster in even the lightest of winds, but it sure helped in those desperate last moments when the wind died about 15 feet from shore. I also found it slightly easier to tack with the motor running. What I like about this is it's an elegant solution to being completely becalmed, plus anyone can buy the kit and put one together.
That's pretty cool. Affordable and easy. Just clip it to the rudder and be done with it. I like that better than I like fitting a motor and MAG throttle.
I just got an email indicating that the ripstop nylon for Minerva's sails has shipped. I better get the ribs glued to the keel and step the masts!
In a moment of chocolate-induced inspiration, I have come up with a proposal for warship armament. The current two proposals based on ship length or number of masts and number of gun decks have a number of flaws to them, not the least being that they give most British 74-gun 3rd rates as many or fewer guns than USS Constitution. Just like Emmett "Doc" Brown, I was struck over the head today by a bag of chocolate chips. When I came to, "eureka!" The magic number 18 appeared in my mind. What is so significant about the number 18, you ask? It is the starting point for my replacement armament proposal. I suggest that we approximately follow the old british "rate" system for warship armaments. 1st rate ships-of-the-line, of 100+ guns, may have up to 18 guns with 900 rounds of ammunition. 2nd rate ships-of-the-line, of 90 to 99 guns, may have up to 16 guns with 800 rounds of ammunition. 3rd rate ships-of-the-line, of 61 to 89 guns, may have up to 14 guns with 700 rounds of ammunition. 4th rate cruisers of 45 to 60 guns, may have up to 12 guns with 600 rounds of ammunition. 5th rate super-frigates of 32 to 44 guns, may have up to 10 guns with 500 rounds of ammunition. 6th rate frigates and corvettes of 20 to 31 guns, may have up to 8 guns with 400 rounds of ammunition. Brigs, sloops, cutters, etc. and all ships under 20 guns, may have up to 6 guns with 300 rounds of ammunition. If a ship's rate or gun rating is not listed on the plans used for construction, then either a gun-port count or two reasonable alternate sources may be used to determine the ship's armament. No more than 50% of a ship's guns may be in any one arc. All guns shall go in historically accurate locations. Any ship operating in combat without at least one square-rigged sail shall arm only half its allotted guns. Thoughts? Comments? We can also try the same thing with starting with the number 16 , or even 14, but if we go too low we screw the little boats.
I would suggest adding: If a ship mounts bow or stern chase armament, no more than 2 cannon may be mounted in either location, and those cannon count against the ship's number of total allowed guns. What do we do for someone building a 'generic' ship? I'm building a specific ship, and this is not a problem for me, but I'm curious; do we just say pick the ship closest in size and armament? Also, what do we do regarding the period tendency to vary the number of guns aboard. Constitution at times carried like unto 50-some-odd guns. The Brits (and presumably everyone else) were known to add or subtract 10 or 20 from time to time... I would suppose that just going with the ship's rated number of guns is the easiest way to go, saying that 'sometimes they carried more' being countered by 'sometimes they carried less...'
Additionally, the proposal lists cutters and sloops as getting 6 guns, but a they by definition are fore-and-aft rigged, which under the later section only get 3 guns total. How do we resolve the contradiction? Basically (as written, unless further cut in half by the last sentence) they would accept a half-strength broadside (compared with the mid-size square-riggers) but gain a LOT of maneuverability, especially to windward.
I was thinking that the number of guns would be the total number of guns, not the number in each broadside. Chasers, broadside guns, swivel guns, wave motion guns, etc. If you build HMS Victory, you get 18 guns to distribute how you want. You can put 9 in each broadside, or 8 in each broadside plus a pair of chasers. I like your idea about limiting chasers. I'll add that to the list. Given the number of plans freely available, I don't think a true "generic" ship will be necessary. I could certainly see someone building the 74-gun HMS Tremendous and calling it HMS Bellerophon, or building the 36-gun HMS Surprise and calling it something entirely different. Actually, that brings up a question. If we do allow "generic" ships, would the skipper building it be allowed to create his own plans, or would he have to follow some sort of guidelines? For sloops and cutters, it's kinda complicated. The classic sloop and cutter in civilian use are purely fore-and-aft rigged, but the rating system of the British Navy considered sloops to be any warship with a complete gun deck that carried up to 18 guns. Some of these, like USS Constellation, were fully ship-rigged. Others carried some square sails, like topsail schooners and the like. Even cutters and packet ships sometimes had square topsails. How does this apply to the 1/2 guns for fore-and-aft vessels proposal? Let's look at the topsail schooner HMS Pickle for an example. HMS Pickle is an unrated vessel, so she is allowed six guns and 300 rounds of ammunition. If the skipper sets both the fore-and-aft courses and the square topsails, then she may fire all six guns. If the skipper takes down the square topsails and all that's left is fore-and-aft, then she may only fire three guns. Put 'em back up, and she gets those other three guns back. I am not sure I like it, though. It certainly encourages the use of brigs and up, but I'm not entirely sure if it is necessary and it is kinda complex to figure out. I have been reading on the RC Groups forum that apparently one guy's USS Somers brig ran down and caught his friend's classic bermuda-rigged sloop on multiple occasions. He said that while his friend's boat could beat to windward better, he could out-sail it in almost any other direction. We may want to withhold judgement on this one until we get some good side-by-side comparisons with fore-and-aft vessels in the same scale.
I had contemplated building MN Creole, a 20-gun cutter, as a loaner boat after I got Minerva sailing. Pics to post this weekend of Minerva on the ways. Mainmasts will be hardwood dowels, bowsprit and jiboom of carbon fiber tubing that's been in the shop.
There are several ways to steer a sailing ship. You can steer her with a rudder, if you want. Or you can steer her with the sails. Or you can do both. A rudder is perfectly sufficient for most maneuvers, and for sailing in almost any straight line. Sails can help you sail a straight line, or not a straight line, or speed up almost any maneuver you want to make. Tack? There are a few simple sail tricks to speed it up. Wear ship? There are basic tricks for that, too. In fact, I think you can wear ship simply using sails, but I haven't tried it yet. Yes, you can even deliberately back up using square sails. Very cool. Tugboat, are you talking about the French 24-gun corvette La Creole from that plans website, or some other ship? because the former is fully ship-rigged and has more than 20 guns, so she would get 8 guns instead of 6. I've got a beautiful set of plans for the Russian brig Mercury, and a Delftship file and plans for the brig USS Somers.
i like it so some one make one and i will too i am in so cal. we have 25+ captains here i can get someone to make one also
lets say the big ships get 10 guns each side and slow the small ships get 6 and fast some thing like 30 to 34 sec. at 100 ft.
I'm not of a mind to limit speed, as it would be quite impossible to put a hard limit on that with sails and wind being what they are. I do like Carl's find on Tower Hobby, the little torpedo-type motor pod that can be clamped to the rudder for steerageway and a little forward motion in the absence of wind.
Joker, next time I'm in the LA area I will bring the Moby Duck along so you can try it. I think you'll find that sailing a square-rigger isn't as hard as rumors would have you think. I've gotten quite good at it, and I've only been sailing for a month. It'll be a while before I start on my own armed 1:48 scale AOS warship. Gotta finish my current Mikasa project first.
I got delayed on Minerva by setting fire to my Lutzow today, with a battle tomorrow. Glad that HobbyKing is cheap enough that I had spares of the damaged parts. Thank God that I standardized my brushless motor leads at 4mm... I did kill an ESC and a 4000mAH battery, though. On the plus side, my ripstop nylon for the sails came in the mail today. It's a nice dark tan color that should bleach in the sun to a nicer light tan color, very period.
It seems RCNC has misplaced my most recent post. I hope your battle went well, Tugboat. Can't wait to hear stories of glorious Axis victory in the smack thread. Sorry to hear about the ESC and battery, though. I think everyone has to toast an ESC at least once in their lives. When I was not busy fixing leaks in a new member's cannons, I have been compiling all the proposed rules in this thread into a v0.1 rulebook. It is rough, short, and poorly organized, but it contains enough information (I think) to describe the construction and operation of age-of-sail warships. You can read it by clicking here. I made a few edits and clarifications to some content, notably the armament chart. I changed the range of 4th-rate warships from 45-60 to 44-60, so the Constitution and her sisters would no longer be in the same rating as the 36-gun frigates which they so severely outclassed. Also, upon further research, I renamed the 6th rate to be "post-ships", not "frigates". Apparently the British considered any ship with more than 20 guns, regardless of its rig, to be a post-ship that requires a full post-captain to command it. While most post-ships were fully ship-rigged and often called frigates, there were a few brigs and other vessels that were classified as post-ships as well. Thus, the 20-gun brig Mercury and other heavily-armed small warships get 8 guns, instead of 6. There are a number of areas that were not discussed, so I included my own proposals on those. Galleys were an important part of combat in the mediterranean, so I included some rules about those. Basically, sail-powered, electric-oar-powered, or electric-prop-powered with a 45-second speed limit. I also borrowed my local club's rules on ramming. Basically, no harm, no foul. Contact between ships is allowed as long as it doesn't cause hull damage or an outright sink. I also included a set of optional rules on boarding. As suggested earlier in this thread, boarding is resolved by a rock-paper-scissors showdown between skippers, with the loser striking his colors. Lastly, I defined "striking the colors" and wrote up some rules about it. Woe betide the fool who strikes his colors early, or who sinks instead of striking, for he shall be subjected to a series of French taunts. Once again, this is an early rough draft. I expect we will find lots of things to edit, add, or subtract as we build our warships and start battling them.
