Thanks gents for the info. I also read that ships carry different weight of sails, heavy for storms but tended to sag. Light sails for light winds which they held their shape better. Anyone hear the same?

Also, a small progress update: I'm working on a ship plan creator. This will solve two problems for me, one is the side view profile of the ships. I wanted to display a side view when looking out through a telescope to help in identifying the ships that you run across. Also I need some calculations of the hull buoyancy for heeling calculations. This will kill two birds.

Plus, for your own ship view I would like to have it sitting in the water, showing a cut away of the decks with crew walking about. Eventually this may feed into a damage model where cannon shots will hit and impact and hit unlucky crew but that one is low priority for now.

Anyway, here is about 4 hours of progress on the designer. The ship isn't a particular ship, it is just me using the designer to build it better. It's crude but a good start.

Name: ship1.jpg Views: 845 Size: 65.7 KB

I also started sketching up fleet movement and AI and how they will follow your flagship/leadship. It's going to be a fun challenge to take into account the wind when determining best course, intercepts, etc. It's all on graph paper at the moment.