A friend wrote a rules system called Gå På. It's for early 18th century land battles. He made the round into 20 minutes, calculated the number of shots that could be fired, factored in casualties and so on. In the early versions I played, nothing happened for many turns. It turns out historical facts may not work well for a game. You have to tweak it so you get a historical feel, a fun time and ok outcomes. It just makes it hard to say what the scale is or how fast something was moving and so on.

In Sails you shouldn't calculate scale into speed, into time of a turn, into broadsides fired a turn, and start questioning why you have to reload. It wont mach up. It's a game made to have a nice historical feel and fast play.