Unit Graphics 2

[LDiCesare]

After a little research, caravels seem to have had either lateen or square sails. The Nina seems to have had lateen sails and then switched to square after the Canary Islands (hermaphrodite cf. http://beatl.barnard.columbia.edu/ma...ipRegistry.htm ). I think square sails would be better looking/more familiar.
Also check this link: http://www.sailingships.hnpl.net/pag.../evolution.htm which is even better. I don't think caravels per se were very used for ocean travels, while caravel redunda were, so I'd rather have the latter. Now a good thing to do would be to have the image change when a seafaring tech increases enough, going from lateen sails to square sails.

[yellowdaddy]

caravel, redo, ok... I assume the others are fine by all... I have to look into Napoleonic ships - the Man o' War and 74 gunners, frigates and all that malarky...

----------------------------------------------------------
the Roman Ship on the screenshot, with two sails is from the "joy of Knowledge" enclopaedia series.
it's called a Roman Grain Ship, but I've seen others with the same look, they all stress the Artemon, or foresail - so I think the one done by Targon is pretty, but not entirely right.

-----------------------------------------------------------
as for your galleys - they might be hard to tell apart at that size?! (whatever the size is!) but I'll have a go;
and yes, ships with sails down, Fireships, and damaged ships and sinking ships/shipwrecks seem nice ideas.

speaking of size....

how big should the Logboat (or dugout) be in relation to your Roundship?
and how big should the Aircraft Carrier be in proportion to your Roundship?

If I do them all the same size, when naturally the smaller units wll be dwarfed by the bigger ones, then won't the bigger units be grossly distorted when scaled?!

(i know you're not bothered about modern units right now, but it'd be nice to know, then I can decide all the relative sizes of ships and post them up as part of a unit library for all to refer to if they want to add or modify any more, plus I can be carrying on with other units whilst waiting for the ok on the different views and any animations to do with the Roundship)

[Gary Thomas]

Laurent, one of your sources is deeply suspect. It is the one that shows a picture of Columbas's (sic) flagship, the Mayflower...

Cheers

[LDiCesare]

I guess I didn't read it all...

[yellowdaddy]

Gary, is there already a link which has an acceptable/accurate image of a Caravel?
if not, well i can search google and books, but i'm not 100 per cent sure what i'm looking for... I always thought that Caravels were just smaller slimmer Carracks, but basically looked the same and had teh same layout.

Thinking of ancient ships - do any other RL civs have any special boats (pre-mediaeval) period? I'm thinking Persians, Phoenicians, Romans (other than roundship), Chinese (other than Junk) - I think Greeks, Vikings, Arabs and Egyptians are covered.

Laurent's korean turtle boat is an example of something amazing that i've never heard of:

http://www.uh.edu/engines/epi1540.htm

any more?

[LDiCesare]

Actually, there was thatch on the roof of the turtle ship, so the enemy wouldn't see the spikes and impale themselves if they tried to board it. Since the upper plates were metallic, it also fooled the opponent into throwing flaming arrows on the thatch, which was totally useless, since the thatch would just burn away without harming the ship.

[Gary Thomas]

Laurent: Working the sail on that turtle boat would be uncomfortable! It doesn't actually look like a useable vessel.

Jack: In spite of my comments about the source that Laurent quoted, the pictures of the caravel and caravel redonda (not redunda) in that source are excellent. If my memory serves me correctly they have been copied from Bjorn Landstrom's book "The Ship", which is about as good an authority as it is possible to get.

Cheers

[Gary Thomas]

As an aside, the best known caravels in history were the Niña and the Pinta, two of the ships of Columbus. The Niña was a caravela latina (lateen rigged) and the Pinta a caravela redonda. However, before the main voyage began, the Niña was converted to a caravela redonda. The real name of the Niña was the Santa Clara, but Spanish sailors had the habit of referring to ships by the feminine version of the owner's name, and the owner was Juan Niño de Moguer. The Pinta was the smallest vessel in the fleet, hence the name (pint-sized).

The third vessel (and the initial flagship) was the carrack or nao Santa María;

Cheers

[yellowdaddy]

it strikes me that that turtle ship would have been rowed with the lid on, as it were, and some of lid would be taken away to sail it, unless the sails aer just to fool the enemy from a distance?

i've got a korean dictionary as it happens, i can't speak it really, but i could look up "turtle" and "ship", to give it a slightly more imaginitive sounding name...

gary, am i right in thinking that your roman ship is the "navis orneraria"? in latin?

what's a hermaphrodite in ship terms?

is Cabot's "Matthew" a caravel or a cog?

this seems like an interesting link - it shows how they used the ships in combat...

http://www.inisfail.com/~ancients/greek-naval.html

[LDiCesare]

Kobukson = turtle-ship. (The problem is to translate Korean sounds in the Roman alphabet. Since they have 3 sounds that might reasonably be written k...)

[Gary Thomas]

Navis orneraria simply meant cargo ship ("ship of burden" I think), so any such ship from the period 1000BC to about 400 AD would do.

The term "hermaphrodite" tended to be used for any vessel that had two purposes, two modes of operation, or two kinds of rigging. It was applied to any galley that had only half an oar bank, being mainly designed for sail. The best known use of the term was "hermaphrodite brig", another term for brigantine, square rigged on one mast, gaff rigged on the other.

Cabot's ship was called the "Mathew" (not Matthew). It was referred to as a navicula, which merely means "small ship". In 1996 a replica was built, after very careful research, and the conclusion at that time was that the Mathew was a caravel (Cabot was an Italian), and certainly not a cog. Cogs had become obsolete a century or more before.

Cheers

Cheers

[yellowdaddy]

Laurant,

I think they are written as " kk " " k " and " k' "
respectively - (same goes for the t and nd s sounds etc)
It must be a Sino-Korean word.
apparently the Japs had them too... (well similar)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironclad

Gary certainly knows his ships!
are there any other Roman (or other Civ) ships of the time which could feature? Or did they all use what we might regard as Greek ships?
Are there any other non-european/mediterranian vessels worth including for these pre-colonial scenarios?


The Roman ships on this site look pretty identical to the Greek ones...

http://www.artsales.com/ARTistory/Ancient_Ships/12_roman_galleons.html

apart from the trade ship - which is a little different to the two previous images I've seen - for a start there's no Artemon/Foresail, and the mast looks to be locate nearer the bow, whereas previous images show it to be nearer the stern...

anyone know more about ancient oriental ships - it looks like the Chinese had some massive "junks", more than just the traditional kind:

http://www.frontlist.com/detail/006054094X

http://www.oceansonline.com/zheng.htm

http://www.maritimeasia.ws/topic/shiptypes.html

on the same site, the chronology data maybe suspect, but it makes interesting reading all the same:

http://www.maritimeasia.ws/topic/chronology.html

this post is turning into a cornucopia of unit gfx reference... I think i've come across a humdinger of a site:

http://www.grinda.navy.ru:8101/sailship/ship/shipanote.htm

some brilliant images and info there, wot wot!

[Gary Thomas]

Gary certainly knows his ships!

In the late 1970s I went from New Zealand to London (pretty near as far as one can travel and still remain on Earth) in order to get material from the British Library for a thesis on 15th Century European shipping, for which source materials are somewhat rare in New Zealand.

I wanted to examine two documents.

One (the Anthony Anthony Roll, half held at the British Library, and the other half held at the Pepysian library at, I think Cambridge, but it may be Oxford, after a quarter of a century I forget the details) was on loan to New York for a Drake exhibition - never mind that it dates from a time when Drake was about 5 years old, and most of the ships were launched before Drake was born.

The other document was destroyed in the blitz.

So I fell back on plan B, which was to have a beer in every pub in London. I managed to get to 200 of them...

Cheers

[Gary Thomas]

this post is turning into a cornucopia of unit gfx reference... I think i've come across a humdinger of a site:

This site is extraordinary.

Apart from my degree in history, I managed by a series of events that even I find hard to follow, to get a degree in Russan. The advertising banner says "Choose a girl" and the little arrow bit, essentially says "More...".

If you click on it you get an internet dating page, in Russian.

The ships are a mixed lot. Suffice to say that the Assyrian - Phoenecian Merchant Ship is actually a warship, not a merchant ship.

It has a ram.

It doesn't have a cargo hold.

Cheers

[yellowdaddy]

I've got GCSE Russian and IOL Intermediate Russian diploma - which doesn't mean a lot, 'cos I can't speak a word! but I did learn the alphabet when I was a kid!
(russian girls = man-eaters!)

the images are lovely, but I still say that many of those ancient ships look awfully similar, and i'm not sure how discernable they'll be as units - but i'll 'av a go!

one disappointment is i've not managed to find many images of asian, i.e. Indian, Indonesian and Chinese vessels - there are apparently a few worth including: meaning that they are more different to each other than some of the european ones.

i'm going to do them again in a more ordered fashion and stick them on my site.

however, if/when you get the time, it'd be good to have your thoughts on which ships to leave out...

PS
I forgot this site as well, which is quite nice - no images but nicely summarised information with a nice user-friendly menu thing:

http://library.thinkquest.org/25723/ancient1.html

this site's in chinese (simplified), and contains a wealth of info (for sinophones) and images about oriental shipping, I'm just posting it so it's here for all to access.

http://shipmuseum.sjtu.edu.cn/quanzhou/quaninfo.htm

i'll also be pillaging it for gfx.
just work your way down the buttons on the left for a comprehensive set of images of chinese boats from dugouts and ancient riverskiffs to more recognisable Sampans and Junks (mu-ban-chuan).

The inclusion of such disticntive oriental units poses a question about the maritime unit tech tree.... chinese vessels have charted an evolutionary route quite different to the west, culminating in the huge 500ft Super-Junk of Zheng-He (pron. Jung-Her), and Laurant's Korean Turtleship.
There are occaisonal similarities - barges, galleys and the like, but the obvious things like the flat bottoms and lug sails are quite unique.

will there be a fork in the road on the tech tree where you have to choose whether to make v-shaped (occidental) or u-shaped (oriental) hulls? will it be determined by resources? (egyptian's had reeds, but not much wood...).

any thoughts?