A Beginner's Guide To Boats!

[John (Zevandir) 80]

Hello, welcome to my guide on boats, ships and floaty things! The purpose for this guide is to essentially create an agreed-upon foundation for naval battles and such, as I’d love to have them, and actively organise them, but there seems to be a distinct sense of uncertainty surrounding them, with common misconceptions and such.

Goals
-Classify ships, according to size, style and rigging!
-Explain a little about how sailing works, and such!

 

Further goals
-Add different ships, and talk about them!
-Glossary of terms!
-Tactics for battle!
-LotC exclusive ship designs for all!

-Clearly set out some actual RP pointers :P

Ship Classification!
((A few links- Link 1! Link 2! ))
Though arguably not quite as in real life, this guide will break ships into two sets of categories, a size based classification, and a ‘type’ based classification. By this all I mean is that you could have a small-sized galley for three people, or a top-sized one for thirty, its all up to you!

Classification by size-
((I’m a little off for names, so if you could help me, throw some names over here!))
A little preword, size is very ambiguous a name, which is generally a good thing when dealing with ships, as you can have a 200x10 ship, or a 30x65 ship, which a roughly the same size, but a totally different shape! Then add in the depth factor, and you’ve got a whole new world of headaches to deal with. So I’m going to stick largely with length, as it seems thats a pretty safe way to generally classify boats.

Dinghies!
Under 10 blocks in length
The idea is that you use this boat to go for a paddle in a river, either for leisure or fishing or some such, or use it to board your ship. In pirate pop-culture, you see a lot of the ‘longboats’ they use to board boats, these aren’t those.

Caravels!
Under 20-25 blocks in length, more than 10.
Next size up, these include single-handed yachts (more on that later ;), pirate longboats, just small boats in general.

Galley/Caracks!
Around 25-40/45 blocks in length
These guys are pretty much the most common class on the server, and this and the previous are what most of you will be subconsciously heading towards, as its a pretty good size.

Galleons!
Around 45-85 in length
These guys are getting really big, and are probably the biggest you’ll see on the server, barring a few exceptions. They’ll need a pretty big crew.

Frigates!
85+
Massive. For a Minecraft, RolePlay orientated server, realistically this is as big as there will be, though on other servers far bigger exist, and in reality, modern ships swamp these guys.

So for general size description of a ship, this is a good guide, but no where near specific enough for us, so lets move on to the next system of classification!

 

Hull types-

Hull types can be loosely grouped into two ‘categories’, those being hulls of overlapping plank construction, known as ‘clinker’, and those of fitted plank construction, known as ‘carvel’. The way that these can be use to identify the two types of hull, is due to the fact that the two types are very advantageous to different styles of ship, and are largely area specific.

That may have been confusing, so let me break it down!

Clinker-
Originated largely in Scandinavia  and due to the overlapping plank construction was generally quite flexible, and due to these reasons lead to the development of ships such the Longboat, an extremely well known design due to its fame among historians and pop-culture Viking fans alike. A lesser known design is that of the knarr, which was a slightly deeper, wider boat used primarily for carrying cargo, as opposed to the almost solely warlike dragon ship.

Carvel-
Stemmed from a need for bigger boats to carry more stuff, and general advancement of technology, originating in Europe. The design allowed for bigger, more rigid boats of multiple decks and different shapes. This style of boat was home to a vastly larger range of boats, including the caravel, the cog, the carack and so on.

Continuing with hull types, they are loosely named in this guide on shape, longship refers to, you guessed it, a norse longship! By the same token, a cog is a tub-shaped cargo boat, a galley is a long rowing boat, and a galleon is a loose term for sail-powered warships.

In general, however, size and hull shape are minor factors in boat classification, with the main feature being the rigging!

Rigging-

Rigging was extremely important to a boat, and though the draft (how deep into the water it went) is important, a ship’s speed and capabilities, as well as specialization are determined very much by rigging, as into the Golden Age of Sailing, hulls became quite similiar, generally either long and relatively thin, close to the water, or large galleons, such as seen in Pirates of the Caribbean. As I honestly don’t know what sort of technology age LotC relies on, I’ll just go with the general understanding that most rigging types are available, though I probably won’t touch steam, because its icky.

The way sailing boats, and sails work is both quite complex, and quite simple. However, the two different ‘forms’ of sails, which fit the three types of rigging neatly, rely on rather different principals and have almost opposite pro’s and con’s. Square rigged sails and fore-and-aft sails, which are sails that run inline with the keel, are the two types, and in all honesty there are no other types of ways to use a sail to propel a boat, though there are hundreds of different combinations and variations, and the totally separate ‘lateen’ rig, that uses a fore-and-aft concept with a square-rigged system. For the sake of clarity, the true mechanics of the two systems will be explained separately, though in general, though its really quite simple.

 

A quick image!

Figure 1. Various sailing rigs: (a) square rig with five yards; (b-g) fore-and-aft rigs, including (b) gaff rig, © lug rig, (d) sprit rig, (e) Portuguese rig, (f) lateen rig, (g) Bermuda rig

[From Encyplopedia: Free Dictionary]

Square Rigs!
Square rigged ships are possibly the most well known on big ships, because they were simpler than lateen and fore-and-aft rigs, and had more power running with the wind. Furthermore, they were also a type of sail that could provide the greatest sail area, which was crucial for speed on larger ships. With very large warships, lateen and fore-and-aft simply couldn’t pack on as much sail. However, the problem with square-riggers was that they struggled heading upwind, and couldn’t sail as close to the wind as the other two types, following a roughly 70 degree to wind tack-line. However, a key point is that bigger ships need square rigs, simply to get more canvas to catch the wind, and get them moving. As a general rule, big square riggers have a max of about 6-8 knots. A key point though, is that square-rigged sails create a lot of drag, as in air resistance, which in turn causes them to go slower. Also, the way that a square-rigger has to catch as much wind as it can, and can only catch the wind with one side, the backside, of the sails further limit this design. However, its a reliable and respected sail plan. Ships such as the Drakkar and such of norse design use single square sails, or lateen in later versions, which is due to the fact that they don’t purely rely on sail power, and have oars!

 

Lateen Rigs!
Lateen rigs are very similar to square rigs. Picture a single-sail square rig, pretty big, on a boat. Now take the top spar, swing it to the side so its inline with the keel, and put it on an angle, so the for’d end almost touches the bowsprit. Then make the sail a right angle triangle, with the bottom edge about 8 feet above the deck. This is a lateen sail! And so the advantages of triangular, inline sails begin! For starters, the ship can now sail much closer to the wind, as the new sail design relies on an aerodynamic ‘low pressure’ on the outside of the sail. I’m not 100% sure why, maybe someone else can input that! Anyway, that low pressure works to ‘suck’ the sail towards it, which in turn multiplies with the actual force of the wind pushing on the sail to create the shape! This large force is then directed through the use of a keel, as the boat has a very high resistance to travelling sideways through the water, and thus the force on the sail works to push to the boat ‘forwards’.

 

Anyway, complicated physics aside, the general idea is that a lateen rigged ship can travel fastest at 90 degrees to windward, and can sail as close as 40 degrees to windward, which is a whole 30 up on the square rigged. However a few downsides include that as much sail area cannot be packed onto the boat, as a lateen, or triangular sail in general needs more room on the ship, as it cannot be just stuck out across the boat and to the sides. Another downside, is that a ballista balt through a square-rigged ship’s sail will destroy only one sail, of many, so that’s alright. But if a boat that is rigged with only a single lateen sail gets a hole in it, that sail will quickly tear, and we all know where that leaves you...

 

Fore-and-aft Rigs!

My personal favourite, fore-and-aft rigs rely completely on the triangular aerofoil concept, and similarly to lateen rigs, are at their most powerful running directly across the wind, and can hold a tack of forty degrees to windward. In modern sailing, some high-speed boats have completely fixed wings, literally wings vertical, rather than a sail at all. Anyway, the idea of actually rigging one of these to your boats is a little different from the other two types of sails, which hang from a spar that can be moved, merely dropping them down and tying them off. In a fore-and-aft sail system, the sail can truly only be rigged in a few ways. All fore-and-aft sails have a main spar hanging horizontally, or near so, from the main mast, and are tied to this main spar when not underway. The reason that this sail plan can be manned by a single sailor sitting at the helm with one hand on the tiller, is that it is raised by a singled rope through a block and pulley at the top of the mast, literally ‘raising’ the sail. Aside from the speed, closeness to windward and general awesomeness of the fore-and-aft sail, it also has another great capability. Unlike the other two rigging systems, a fore-and-aft rigging system catches wind on both sides of the sail, as in, when changing tack, the only thing that changes is which side of the boat the boom is on. The boom is the horizontal main spar, by the way. In the famous Pirates of the Caribbean scene, when Captain Jack swings a boom into Will Turner aboard the royal ship, early in the first movie, thats exactly what he does, swings a boom across the deck, from which a fore-and-aft sail is rigged. A few points, though the fore-and-aft rig suffers a little from air resistance, it is not nearly as much as the huge flat surfaces of the square rigger, and in fact, as you pull the boom closer and tighten the sail, decreasing the ‘luff’ of the sail, the air-resistance drops as the speed increases. Furthermore, it would seem that a fore-and-aft rig is not as effective downwind as a square-rigger, and though to some degree this is true, you can ‘sheet out’ the fore-and-aft’ rig, as in, let the boom swing out over the water, to create a similar ‘wind catcher’ to the square riggers! The versatility of a fore-and-aft rig is matched only by its speed, able to travel faster than the wind in the right conditions, incredible, right? Some of the highest speeds of historical cutters, which were very fast fore-and-aft rigged coastal ships, are up to 17 knots, which could work to suggest that, coupled with a little magic and fantasy aspects of LotC, a good speed is around 20 knots as a max. Also, I mentioned square-sailed norse ships in that section, however, I gotta point out, that especially in LotC, things evolve, and so I think that a good option for such boats is either a pair of lateen sails, such as corsairs, or one or two fore-and-aft rigs.

 

In general, sails rely on creating a ‘wing’, such as in a aeroplane, except on a different plane. While aeroplanes use the airfoil shape of the wing to generate lift upwards, using high pressures and low pressures. . Boat sails create a similar shape, and use that to ‘pull’ them through the water. However, it isn’t quite that simple. The boat uses a force created by the ‘pull’ of the sail, and the resistance of the keel to being pulled sideways, to move through the water. This is why a keel is so important in your boat! You may be wondering, or have been under the impression the whole time, that the wind merely blew, and the sails caught the wind and got pushed along, however this is not true, if it was, ships could never go faster than the wind, whereas with sails a ship most surely can, with recent high-tech designs allowing boats to reach speeds of over 60MPH easily, have a look at the radical record-breaking boats of recent history, and the boats of the America’s Cup! Though, the America’s Cup boats have already killed people, which isn’t fab at all.

In summary of this section, boats are classified, not into distinct groups, but through a combination of a few different aspects. For instance, one of my recent ships would be a Galleon-Clinker-Lateen, which would give the reader almost all the information they need, suggesting the 80m length, the Scandinavian Drakkar design, and the Lateen sail! In fact, I’ve built two of these hulls on the server already, and you can see a picture below!

With classifications done, its time to move on to the next section!

Mechanics of sailing!

Though the physics principles, of each sail type and in general have been explained, there remains a few bits left.

For starters, absolutely never, never ever, may a boat sail directly into wind. Literally, it is impossible. To this end, a tactic called ‘tacking’ is employed, in which a boat sails as close to the wind as it can, in a zig-zag pattern. Here comes the difference between triangular and square sails, obviously I mean the rigging, ‘triangular’ is just a quick way of saying lateen/fore-and-aft! A square-rigger has to travel a much longer distance upwind, than a triangular-rigged vessel, as it can’t go as straight upwind. However, courses across oceans with reliable winds are often planned to accommodate this, and visit ports in such a zig-zag pattern, so they’re always heading straight for their next destination.

The way a crew must work to set up sails and such is vastly more complicated on a ‘tall ship’, a boat with tall masts and lots of square sails. In this type of ship, crew must unfurl each sail, and tie this sail in place, with ropes through pulleys on the ends of spars, leading down to the deck. I’ll provide some diagrams and helpful sites later, as me trying to paraphrase the information here would lead to headaches and such that you really don’t need!

However, I can easily describe how the deployment of a fore-and-aft rigged ship works. Step 1, grab the rope leading from the top of the sail to the top of the mast, through a pulley system and back to you. Right, got that rope? Pull it. Till the sail gets to the top. Tie off the rope. Step 2, grab the rope leading from the end of the boom to the helm with one hand, and the tiller with the other hand. If its a big boat, you may need a few people on each. Right, the tiller is your steering wheel, and the rope is the throttle. Go! How easy is that? With that in mind, absolutely go for your life RP’ly, and next time you want a boat, consider two options. The first, build a nice and simply long boat, with a nice and simply fore-and-aft rig, and enjoy your events. Second option? Well, the button to send me a forum message is around here somewhere ;D ((I’m cheap don’t panic!)).

Here’s a brief skit-
The wind whistles, the swell of the dark blue ocean rising and falling, foamy whitecaps crash softly. Jon sits in the back of his small, single-handed yacht-sloop. A dark brown hand, burned from years on the sea, rests on the carved wooden tiller lazily. His bare feet rest on the deck, stretched out in front of him. Slight storm clouds rumble overhead, but he isn't concerned. Whistling a silly ditty about ‘Hoisting the Colours’, he lashes the tiller straight, the current still carrying him along. Without getting up, he unwinds a thick rope from a cleat on the starboard side of the deck. He begins pulling on it, not too hard, the pulleys doing their job. A patched sail, once black, now a faded grey and covered in numerous coloured patches, rises slowly from the boom where it had been lazily draped a few hours before. The boat begins to strain a little, the sail far too large for the boat, completely over-rigged and meant for speed, regardless of the tired, lazy appearance. The sail reaches the top, and Jon reloops the rope into the cleat, knotting it tight, deft fingers moving in tune with the whistling song. He unlashes the tiller, and grips a different rope with his other hand, letting it out slowly. The rope is attached to the boom, and as he turns the tiller, it swings out, catching the wind. Jon chuckles softly, the turns the small boat directly across the wind. The boat picks up speed, and Jon grunts as he pulls the rope, bringing the boom back, almost centre along the boat. He grins wildly, as the boat flies across the water, salty spray staining further his bleached hair. He bursts into song, as the boat lifts further out of the water, virtually hydroplaning. An onlooker would see a small, dark craft, an insane-looking man at the helm. But they wouldn't see it for long.

That there friends, is what sailing is like for me in real like, and what I try to emulate in Anthos. I want to bring it to you all, and you can have the same experience through role play! Do it with friends, experiment, design your own boats. I’m not going to give word for word *emotes, you guys can do that!

If you want technical and nautical terms for things, I’ll be happy to add them, I want your opinion, your comments, your suggestions, as I believe this is an unexplored area of roleplay that could be incredible amounts of fun! Remember, its a WIP, so anything I can or should add, I will, just tell me! Oh, with the next update to the guide, I’ll be adding a bit about common ships, such as the well-known sloop, and also cutters, schooners, ketches and such.

By the way, thanks for reading! Here are some boats-

My personal gift, is a few basic hulls, that you can use to create your own boats in game! However, please remember that I give my permission to use these schematics purely on the LotC server, and for private use. If you want to use them, or a ship created from them in any other server, or in any sort of video, please message me about it.

Cheers, John

 

Changelog-

-Added some sail-plan pictures, and links- 4/10/13

[weatherman321 19]

Holy crap. That is an incredibly detailed and well-thought-out guide. Excellent resource for those who want to create a different type of RP (and a type I wouldn't mind seeing more of).

 

Might I suggest though adding some example pictures of the different kind of ships? For example, I was unsure of what a fore-aft sail was for a while there (the triangular ones, right?) All in all though, props for taking the time to write this.

[Geo 1415]

Nicely done sir.

[John (Zevandir) 80]

Holy crap. That is an incredibly detailed and well-thought-out guide. Excellent resource for those who want to create a different type of RP (and a type I wouldn't mind seeing more of).

 

Might I suggest though adding some example pictures of the different kind of ships? For example, I was unsure of what a fore-aft sail was for a while there (the triangular ones, right?) All in all though, props for taking the time to write this.

I'll get right on some pictures! Thanks!

 

Edit: Done, but the image isn't the best. I tried to grab some of Wikipedia, but the forums wouldn't let me :(

[Insomnic 129]

Very awesome. I hope you're a shipwright IG, cause I would love to buy a ship from you one day.

[Mish_ 101]

I sail IRL, this is pretty good

[Minea 124]

Very awesome. I hope you're a shipwright IG, cause I would love to buy a ship from you one day.

He is, serves Wolvengard TM. Where you boats are your friends! 

[John (Zevandir) 80]

@The Insomniac- thanks man! I am, actually, and if you were keen on a boat, just pop me a message over the forums!

@Ethan- that's wicked! I do too, though I'm currently focused on restoring a vintage little sailing dinghy :P

[Mish_ 101]

Cool.

I love sailing Lazers (Or however you spell it)

[Sky 0]

Who knew such knowledge can come from you John.

 

Very informative and beautifully descriptive~ 

[John (Zevandir) 80]

Cool.

I love sailing Lazers (Or however you spell it)

Da best :P I've got an old Sea Bird, '86 I think. ((Otherwise I'm actually a power-boater xD))

Cheers Sky!

[TheBareSheet 194]

Moved to the Archive. It shall be sorted into the appropriate category shortly.

[TheBareSheet 194]

Moved to the Archive. It shall be sorted into the appropriate category shortly.