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Thread: Question on relative speeds of ship types at various points of sail

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    Default Question on relative speeds of ship types at various points of sail

    I've been trying to research something, so I'll throw it out to the group...

    Let's say that a ship's best speed at its best point of sail in a given wind -- all other things being equal -- is 100%. The other points of sail in that wind would be something less than 100%.

    Would this be plausible for a square-rigger:

    Broad Reach = 100% of best speed
    Running = 75% of best speed
    Beam Reach = 50% of best speed
    Beating = (%?)

    I'm also trying to make a similar breakdown for the topsail schooners that fought on the Great Lakes (particularly the slow, unstable converted transports that Chauncey used on Lake Ontario, like the Raven, Hamilton, Asp, etc.)

    Would this be plausible for those topsail schooners:

    Beam Reach = 100% of best speed
    Broad reach = 75% of best speed
    Run = 50% of best speed
    Beat = 15% of best speed

    If my percentages seem way off to you, please suggest ones that seem more accurate.

    I read that in general, fore-and-aft rigged ships have their best point of sail on a beam reach (is that right?)
    But I think that's a generalization based on a sharp hull that can hold its course better to windward. I don't think that was necessarily true for the Lake Ontario ships, which had "bluff" hulls and shallow drafts as former cargo haulers. Contemporary accounts say they lost so much ground to windward that they couldn't hold place in a line of battle, and could only do so if towed.
    Another question is whether these schooners' ability to run wing-and-wing* and deploy their topsails gave these particular types of schooners a better speed when running than a plain "baldheaded" schooner -- and if so, how would that reflect in those percentages above? Maybe it's running that should be the point of sail with 100% of best speed, in the case of a topsail schooner?

    Also, I think the shallow-draft Great Lakes brigs and corvettes couldn't really sail much to windward at all.

    But I need to quantify this to get some plausible movement allowances for each of the 8 points of sail for the Maneuver Level of my game, "A Glorious Chance."
    By capturing the relative characteristics of the way the ships sailed, I hope to give them realistic advantages or disadvantages against each other in various wind and attitude conditions.

    I'm sure some of you experienced real and miniature sailors have some thoughts about this. Come alongside, grab your speaking trumpet and let's hear 'em!

    *Running before the wind with foresail hauled over on one side and mainsail on the other. Old schooner captains sometimes called this "reading the book," because the sails looked like the pages of an open book.

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    A couple of quick points. Both Sq riggers and fore and aft ships have their best point of sail on a quartering wind - ie; broad reach. In general a beam reach is a better point of sail than running. Tops'l schooners can maintain pretty good speed upwind as well, general percentage more like 50% of best speed. You may be right about the converted merchantmen though, lot more leeway to consider based on hull form. Some of the converted ships did have sharp hulls, but were unbalanced because of the guns, consider Hamilton and Scourge for example.

    As for close hauled - for sq rigged ships I'd say 25%, and of course only sailing to about 60 degrees (in a weatherly ship) as opposed to 45 degrees in a schooner.

    Do you have a copy of "Seamanship in the Age of Sail" by Harland? Invaluable reference for this kind of thing. I'll see what I can come up with once I get home to help out.

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    A couple of quick points. Both Sq riggers and fore and aft ships have their best point of sail on a quartering wind - ie; broad reach. In general a beam reach is a better point of sail than running. Tops'l schooners can maintain pretty good speed upwind as well, general percentage more like 50% of best speed. You may be right about the converted merchantmen though, lot more leeway to consider based on hull form. Some of the converted ships did have sharp hulls, but were unbalanced because of the guns, consider Hamilton and Scourge for example.

    As for close hauled - for sq rigged ships I'd say 25%, and of course only sailing to about 60 degrees (in a weatherly ship) as opposed to 45 degrees in a schooner.

    Do you have a copy of "Seamanship in the Age of Sail" by Harland? Invaluable reference for this kind of thing. I'll see what I can come up with once I get home to help out.

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    Great info and very helpful, DeRuyter!
    No, I don't have a copy of that Harland book -- always wanted it, but too expensive for my budget (and currently unavailable on amazon.com anyway).
    Please check your sources and let me know what else you can find -- much appreciated.

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    Quote Originally Posted by DeRuyter View Post
    As for close hauled - for sq rigged ships I'd say 25%, and of course only sailing to about 60 degrees (in a weatherly ship) as opposed to 45 degrees in a schooner.
    For game purposes, since I'm using a square grid with 8 points of sail -- the closest windward point of sail for square-riggers in the game will be 90 degrees. So, for these particular ships -- the Lake Ontario corvettes and brigs -- a beam reach *is* effectively close-hauled, and there's no speed at 45 degrees to the wind or 0 degrees. Too harsh?

    The closest windward point of sail for schooners will be 45 degrees.
    Last edited by Broadsword56; 06-26-2015 at 19:27.

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    Hi Gina,

    In volume II of this book, you might find some info of use to you: http://www.hnsa.org/resources/manual...nd-seamanship/

    It is currently printed in four volumes, volume four corresponding to part of volume II in the original.
    “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” ― Plato

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    Thank you 7Eat51 -- I looked in Volume II and I can see that it discusses the same issues I raised in this thread. The text is impenetrable to me, unfortunately, and I'm not enough of a geometry or physics afficionado to understand it. If you read it and did follow it, hats off to you!

    I'm hoping DeRuyter or others might have further suggestions before I make any firm decisions about the ships' sailing characteristics.

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    There is a great video aboard the Star of India showing all the particulars of setting sail. It helps to see with your own eyes how it works. https://youtu.be/CJ1XUeeIttc

    You can get a better feel for how a ship acts as it wears downwind or tacks into the wind with another video aboard the Star of India: https://youtu.be/BxCKGS_bLKI

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    Fascinating Ken.
    All those strange orders given in so many sailing novels explained in a couple of videos.
    Thanks for that.
    Rob.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Kentop View Post
    There is a great video aboard the Star of India showing all the particulars of setting sail. It helps to see with your own eyes how it works. https://youtu.be/CJ1XUeeIttc

    You can get a better feel for how a ship acts as it wears downwind or tacks into the wind with another video aboard the Star of India: https://youtu.be/BxCKGS_bLKI
    Excellent videos, thanks for sharing

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    Quote Originally Posted by Broadsword56 View Post
    I'm sure some of you experienced real and miniature sailors have some thoughts about this. Come alongside, grab your speaking trumpet and let's hear 'em!

    *Running before the wind with foresail hauled over on one side and mainsail on the other. Old schooner captains sometimes called this "reading the book," because the sails looked like the pages of an open book.
    I wouldn't put too much effort into differentiating speed and maneuvering among types of vessels. The greatest maximum difference between the speed of a fast frigate and a slow first rate ship of the line is about 5 to 10 knots. That difference changes with wind speed. In light airs, the frigates could run circles around a SOL. In a heavy blow, that advantage is dramatically reduced. HMS Victory, a first rate SOL, was said to be able to do 8 knots! The frigate USS Constitution's top speed was 14 knots. That's a "whopping" 7 miles per hour difference. As for sailing close to the wind, There is no real difference at all between square riggers of any size. Crew experience and weather/sea conditions are much more important factors than speed differences based on hull design, etc. For example, in heavy seas, a square rigger in a trough between large waves loses the wind (and it's ability to make progress) in it's lower sails because the waves are literally blocking the gale force wind. The royal and topgallant sails become all important. So does the strength of the masts. My point is that it's all dynamics and I think Sails of Glory hits it right on the "average" head with their movement cards. You can apply the average across the board for all sailing rigs of the time without being too far off for any of them. Bermuda rigs can sail much closer to the wind than square rigs. But you can literally sail a square rig just like a bermuda rug. You just have to douse all your square sails and use your staysails, spanker and jib sails. It won't be as fast, but you can still match how close you can get to the wind. In a pinch, with damage to your ship, you could convert any square rigger to a Junk rig and sail home with almost zero crew.
    Last edited by Kentop; 06-27-2015 at 14:42.

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    Thanks for those video links!!
    "It's not the towering sails, but the unseen wind that moves a ship."
    –English Proverb

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    Excellent points, Kentop (and thanks for the video links!)
    This may be controversial, but in my maneuver-level game I plan to model only wind directions -- not velocity. This is partly for simplicity and playability's sake, and because I think the relative wind direction matters much more during the maneuvering than the wind velocity. That's because I don't care much about absolute speeds as much as relative speeds between maneuvering ships, as their movements change their attitudes toward the wind and their best possible percentage of top speed in each situation. Of course the velocity matters in real life, but I'm abstracting it out.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Nightmoss View Post
    Thanks for those video links!!
    When I play in a group, I like to shout out sailing instructions when I play my movement cards, "Helms alee, douse the mainsail and foresail, downhaul the jib and stay sails. Ready, let go and haul!", and then move the ship. If I am playing the French, I say it in french, Helms alee is "barrier sous le vent".
    Surprisingly, people who have never played SOG really start getting into it because they have heard that kind of salty talk before...in their favorite movies or books. They start asking questions about what the jargon means, and it makes their first exposure to the game that much more fascinating. I think what they appreciate the most is how important wind direction is to the game. Something X-wing, Wings of glory, and all the other wings need to consider.

    What they don't tell you in Wings of Glory is that an Immelmann turn could only be performed by a couple of aircraft during WWI (SE-5a?). Most aircraft simply didn't have enough power to achieve a steep climb even after diving, followed by hard right or left rudder and subsequent loss of speed at the top of the turn. The planes would simply stall and fall. Flying into a headwind, however, made the maneuver possible with slightly smaller motors. With a tail wind, you would stall the minute you pulled back on the stick. Immelmann himself flew the mighty Fokker Eindecker, which, seriously, was a box kite with a motor. He's not doing Immelmann turns in that thing. It only was a thing in WWII, when planes had the structure and motors to actually do it. But I digress.
    Last edited by Kentop; 06-27-2015 at 15:53.

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    Here's an example of what I'm aiming for...



    This would be the maneuver marker for Sailing Class 1 (in the white diamond), which is converted laker schooners and fore-and-aft-rigged gunboats, convoy boats, etc. It's one of 7 sailing classes, with 1 the slowest and 7 the fastest. Within each class, the performance of the ship type at each point of sail is represented by a movement allowance (the large number). The superscript number is the MA when usuing sweeps (oars).

    The MA represents the number of 1km squares it can move in a 30-minute game turn. Moving through the side of a square costs 1 MP; moving through a corner of a square costs 2 MP.

    In this example, the converted laker schooners have 100% of their best speed at a broad reach, 75% of their best speed at a beam reach, 50% of their best speed when running, and 25% when beating.

    The actual ships represented by this marker will be tracked with counters on an off-map display. The force will use whichever marker corresponds to the Sailing Class of the slowest ship in the stack. Stacks will be limited to 6 ships. And converted laker schooners like these, which couldn't sail line of battle, will only be able to stack with other ships if they're being towed (in which case the towing ship's class is used, with a speed penalty).

    Comments?
    Last edited by Broadsword56; 06-27-2015 at 16:29.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Broadsword56 View Post
    Looks a bit like _Admiral_'s movement system -- it uses a point-to-point square grid; there's two movement values, one for orthogonal movement, one for diagonal; one gets one's maximum speed only if one is moving with the wind, and for every "point" (45 degrees) off that, it's -1 to that movement mode.

    For ex.: A unit gets 5 orthogonal MP, 4 diagonal. The wind is NE. If the unit is moving NE, it gets 4 MP; N or E would also be 4 MP (5 orthogonal, -1 for being one off the wind); NW or SE would be 2 MP (4 diagonal, -2 off-wind); W or S would be 2 MP (5 orthogonal, -3 off-wind); SW would be 0 MP (4 diagonal, -4 off-wind).

    So not only is wind direction accounted for, it even incorporates the need to tack back and forth to move "upwind". (There's also rules for "becalmed" and "storm".)

    They don't (yet) have rules for F&A-rigs; but I cribbed something together: Rather than "0, -1, -2, -3, -4", the penalty is "-1, 0, -1, -2, -3".

    Finally: You say small ships cannot use "line" tactics; yet in the big-name Great Lakes battles, they did exactly this (with varying degrees of success)....

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    Quote Originally Posted by csadn View Post
    Finally: You say small ships cannot use "line" tactics; yet in the big-name Great Lakes battles, they did exactly this (with varying degrees of success)....
    It's just the converted laker schooners on Lake Ontario that had this problem. They were merchant schooners that the USN purchased and refitted with swivel-mounted long guns in a crash program to get some warships on the lake. They were OK ships originally, though not men-of-war. But the weight of the added guns on deck raised their center of gravity so much that they became unstable in anything but calm conditions. They were too slow to keep up with the brigs and corvettes, and they couldn't hold a line with them. So, whenever Commodore Chauncey had to enter battle with his total squadron, he took these ships under tow. When the conditions were calm, he'd let these ships sail ahead (or even have them use sweeps) to screen his main body and pound the British from standoff range.

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    You should move the boat silhouette so that the bow is pointed at it's fastest speed. In the history of markers, chits, or counters, that direction is straight up. You simply rotate the numbers around to follow the nose. If the bow of your ship is 45 degrees to the right and moving at 0 feet, it will only confuse players. They need to "steer" their ships. Get rid of the oar speeds. The ships are either without oars or with both oars and sails. In either case, the ships would not normally have both numbers unless theuy actually had oars. No ship after, say, 1600 had oars. I could even argue that oars in a favorable current would be even more efficient that sails. The russians learned that.

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    Quote Originally Posted by Broadsword56 View Post
    Excellent points, Kentop (and thanks for the video links!)
    This may be controversial, but in my maneuver-level game I plan to model only wind directions -- not velocity. This is partly for simplicity and playability's sake, and because I think the relative wind direction matters much more during the maneuvering than the wind velocity. That's because I don't care much about absolute speeds as much as relative speeds between maneuvering ships, as their movements change their attitudes toward the wind and their best possible percentage of top speed in each situation. Of course the velocity matters in real life, but I'm abstracting it out.
    Your maneuver-level game would only matter between say, square rigs and any other rig. Chinese junks, as small as they were, did not need men to set the sails. They sailed the same way modern bermuda rigged RC boats do today.

    Name:  rc boat.jpg
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    My Bermuda rigged RC boat.

    So, you could use a much smaller pirate crew to man your ship. The difference between a merchantman and a frigate, as far as maneuverability goes, is a wash. You need to state exactly what kind of game you are looking for. Modeling only wind direction but not wind speed is only half the equation. It's like saying I can move this exactly this far every turn, but can only veer this much based on my boat attributes.
    Last edited by Kentop; 06-27-2015 at 17:42.

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    There are many ways to do it, and no one right way.
    Just one example:



    SPI's "Fighting Sail" is a good game and still played, and it only models wind direction and not velocity.

    Sorry I didn't make this clear, but there's also a wind direction marker in each wind zone of my gridmap, which indicates the direction of the wind. You use the speed number on the counter that matches the point the wind marker is blowing from.

    Re: sweeps -- The ships on the Great Lakes had them and used them, often to significant effect. They were essential because the weather patterns there in summer so frequently fell calm. Example: Lake Ontario, Action off the Genesee, 11 September 1813. The entire episode was a slow-motion chase with both sides under oars. The little converted laker schooners slowly gained on the larger ships of the British squadron. The British ships used oars and resorted to kedging in a desperate effort to keep out of long gun range, but they took damage and it started to look bad -- until the evening land breeze came up and the British were able to withdraw into a friendly harbor.
    Last edited by Broadsword56; 06-27-2015 at 18:04.

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    Becalmed ships in the age of sail were a fact of life back then, even on the open seas, but oars haven't determined an outcome in a naval war for a thousand years. You are talking about a rag-tag not ready for prime time bunch of North American volunteers in row boats taking on the British in 1813. All they (the rowboats) did was make things worse. BTW, how do you rig an oar through a gunport and man it?. The British did it and managed to slip away from the 'Muricans.

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    Many of the lakes ships were built with a separate row of sweep ports.

    The twin US brigs Niagara and Lawrence, on Lake Erie, had 18 sweeps each, and each sweep was 25 feet long, according to Walter P. Rybka (the captain of the modern day Niagara replica).

    The sweeps helped with getting under way and maneuvering in narrow channels.

    Rybka mentions the occasional opportunistic role of sweeps in battle this passage from his book, The Lake Erie Campaign of 1813 (p. 85):

    "The immediate risk that Perry took by this change in course [sailing bows toward the enemy] was in exposing his vessels to raking fire while closing the range...there lurked the even greater risk that the breeze would die out altogether and leave the Lawrence dead in the water before achieving carronade range...The one hope then would have been to use the sweeps to close the range.Speed under sweeps was at best 2 knots..."

    There's a picture on p. 89 of the book, showing a sweep demonstration aboard the modern-day Niagara. It shows three crew per sweep, so I guess you'd need 54 men in good shape to work them if all were in action. His caption says these demonstrations have shown that "even untrained rowers can move [the Niagara] along at 1.5 to 2 knots."

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    Quote Originally Posted by Kentop View Post
    Becalmed ships in the age of sail were a fact of life back then, even on the open seas, but oars haven't determined an outcome in a naval war for a thousand years. You are talking about a rag-tag not ready for prime time bunch of North American volunteers in row boats taking on the British in 1813. All they (the rowboats) did was make things worse. BTW, how do you rig an oar through a gunport and man it?. The British did it and managed to slip away from the 'Muricans.
    Sorry Kenneth,
    You are wrong. 1790 the Battle of Krasnaya Gorka (Styrsudden) and the Battle of Vyborg Both in the Baltic. Both sides the Russians and Swedes used sail and rowing ships/boats. The biggest ships which could row had 38 guns. Rower able frigates. At Vyborg the Swedes used about 200 small rowing boats. That with my poor maths is 22 years before 1812 not a thousand.
    Be safe
    Rory

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    Somehow, "the age of fighting oar" doesn't have quite the same ring to it :-)

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    Kenneth, thanks for pointing us to these videos. They were great; I am sure they will be better on second viewing. Wonderful seeing some of what I have read on or played being done in real life.
    “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” ― Plato

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    Quote Originally Posted by Broadsword56 View Post
    Somehow, "the age of fighting oar" doesn't have quite the same ring to it :-)
    Greco-Roman warfare? The wars of the Norsemen? Hell, I picked up a game at Enfilade! this year which covered warfare in Polynesia, for crying out loud....

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