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The Lord Bude posted:Honestly the only place you can go once you’ve absorbed O’Brien is Jane Austen. This is very true. Reading Patrick O'Brian taught me to enjoy Jane Austen.
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Sep 23, 2022 16:29
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The Lord Bude posted:Honestly the only place you can go once you’ve absorbed O’Brien is Jane Austen. how many cannons does she have and how is she rigged?
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Sep 23, 2022 16:45
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It's a testament to O'Brian that I think the authors closest to him are people writing in the 19th century - James Fenimore Cooper's Wing-and-Wing I remember being pretty good, for example.
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Sep 23, 2022 17:02
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ChubbyChecker posted:how is she rigged? Fore and aft, by and large! 
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Sep 23, 2022 18:15
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I'm three chapters into Post-Captain, I am feeling the Austen comparisons.
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Sep 23, 2022 18:19
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Ubersandwich posted:I'm three chapters into Post-Captain, I am feeling the Austen comparisons. yeah, it's his most austenish book. when i first read it i thought that it was the worst of the series, but later it has grown on me.
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Sep 23, 2022 20:54
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The ladies getting very excited to teach those poor sailors how to keep a house clean.
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Sep 24, 2022 06:53
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Just finished HMS Surprise. drat, poor Stephen. He really got kicked around in this one.
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Sep 24, 2022 22:50
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I really liked that Diana ran off again, like that's exactly what she would do
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Oct 4, 2022 17:05
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Oh wow, I just started reading Master and Commander because I was getting into 19th century naval wargaming and wanted to immerse myself in the world, but I didn't imagine there'd be a dedicated Aubrey-Maturin thread. I'm loving M&C so far, though I'm only about halfway through it. Anyway, I don't have much else to contribute yet so here's some 19th c. ships-of-the-line that I painted up, each about the diameter of a quarter. 
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Oct 5, 2022 19:00
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I just finished a re-read of The Far Side of the World (which has one of the best endings of any of the books IMO), and opened The Reverse of the Medal to remind myself if the Hermiones were ever mentioned again, and came across a funny comment from the port Admiral, in view of the last book. In The Far Side of the World, Jack is lamenting to Stephen that another Captain has lied to him that the war was over, when Jack suspected it was not. Stephen, calls him out on his own lies in service of war (flying under foreign colors, stolen signals, etc) and Jack responds that it's just not the same: quote:'Oh,' cried he, 'those are just ruses de guerre, and perfectly legitimate: they are not direct lies like saying it is peace when you know damned well it is war[...]Perhaps it is a distinction too nice for a civilian, but I do assure you it is perfectly clear to sailors. At the beginning of The Reverse of the Medal Jack is talking to the admiral, describing his encounter with the Captain as behaving strangely, "in the first place he said the war was over..." To which the Admiral replies: quote:'That's fair enough. A legitimate rude de guerre.' Raskolnikov2089 fucked around with this message at 20:58 on Oct 11, 2022 |
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Oct 8, 2022 22:02
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I'm curious, what was the fastest a man of war in Aubrey's time could go? Early on, the books make it seem like ten or eleven knots is a rare feat of speed, but such paces seem to get more frequent as time goes on, and I think at one point O'Brien mentions 15 knots. Obviously it depends a lot on the vessel and the arrangement of sail and stowage, but it's one of those things that I wonder how much was speculative on O'Brien's part and how much came out of the logs he was poring over.
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Oct 11, 2022 23:21
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Farmer Crack-rear end posted:I'm curious, what was the fastest a man of war in Aubrey's time could go? Early on, the books make it seem like ten or eleven knots is a rare feat of speed, but such paces seem to get more frequent as time goes on, and I think at one point O'Brien mentions 15 knots. There’s a formula for it! Im not sure if it’s the same for multi-mast vessels but for a single keel single mast it’s 1.34 x the square root of the length of the water line in feet.
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Oct 12, 2022 00:14
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Raskolnikov2089 posted:There’s a formula for it! Im not sure if it’s the same for multi-mast vessels but for a single keel single mast it’s 1.34 x the square root of the length of the water line in feet. A 78' Sophie would have a hull speed just under 12kn, and a 126' Surprise would have a hull speed of 15kn, for instance
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Oct 12, 2022 00:39
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And then the yards are not great in this time period so individual ships built to the same lines would have different speeds, or even different speeds between drydocks as their hulls accumulated marine debris and their timbers worked loose and became less stiff and therefore lost more wind energy to flexing.
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Oct 12, 2022 02:18
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Wait bigger ships can go faster? . . .I think I had picked that up actually but it's still weird
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Oct 12, 2022 02:20
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For comparison, the fastest clippers and windjammers of the late 19th/early 20th century topped out at 20-25kn in perfect conditions, which I would imagine is pretty much the limit for a square rigged ship until Elon Musk gets interested in tall ships or something.
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Oct 12, 2022 03:01
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:Elon Musk. Practically a textbook definition of the word "Scrub".
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Oct 12, 2022 03:11
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yaffle posted:Practically a textbook definition of the word "Scrub". Scrubby McScrubface in these modern parts.
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Oct 12, 2022 04:18
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Wait bigger ships can go faster? The fact that this is especially true in heavy seas was always amazing to me, where big ships got more wind simply by virtue of being tall enough to still catch the wind "between" waves. In fact, everything about people sailing in that kind of mad sea is amazing to me, coupled with the fact that sailing a big dumb chunk of wood through 40' rolling waves during hellacious storms was just a part of the job. One of the most taxing and terrifying parts of the job, but not like a singular heroic event; just a regular (if lovely) Tuesday going 'round the horn. Meanwhile a fairly busy weekend at my hospitality job leaves me kind of a wreck for days.
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Oct 12, 2022 05:39
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Sinatrapod posted:
Perhaps it's the food? Try eating nothing but boiled flour, slightly rotten salt beef and a pint or two of rum and see how you feel.
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Oct 12, 2022 13:32
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uPen posted:Perhaps it's the food? Try eating nothing but boiled flour, slightly rotten salt beef and a pint or two of rum and see how you feel. a duel could perhaps help too
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Oct 12, 2022 14:11
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Kaiser Schnitzel posted:For comparison, the fastest clippers and windjammers of the late 19th/early 20th century topped out at 20-25kn in perfect conditions, which I would imagine is pretty much the limit for a square rigged ship until Elon Musk gets interested in tall ships or something. What exactly changed to almost double the speed? Engineering? Materials? From some of the descriptions in the books it sure sounds like there was already a lot of advanced engineering involved with ship geometry.
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Oct 12, 2022 14:14
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A Proper Uppercut posted:What exactly changed to almost double the speed? Engineering? Materials? steel made the hulls lighter, stronger, smoother, and especially longer the masts also got taller, and the sails larger
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Oct 12, 2022 14:24
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ChubbyChecker posted:steel made the hulls lighter, stronger, smoother, and especially longer I guess I never realized that steel and sails overlapped at any point.
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Oct 12, 2022 14:34
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Hieronymous Alloy posted:Wait bigger ships can go faster? I think it's basically leverage; remember those scenes where they're racing along and the foam is at the fore mainchains and the deck is tilted? The harder the wind pushes on the sails, the further it tips the ship forward, so at some point you'd just push the ship into the sea. A longer ship takes more force to achieve the same degree of tilt. I think. Someone correct me if I'm wrong. Oh yeah also what someone said about taller masts still catching the wind in rough seas.
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Oct 12, 2022 14:54
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A Proper Uppercut posted:I guess I never realized that steel and sails overlapped at any point. The admirals don't want to train gunnery because their predecessors just fought at point blank or boarded everyone. You're going to convince these people they don't need sails?
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Oct 12, 2022 15:41
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A Proper Uppercut posted:What exactly changed to almost double the speed? Engineering? Materials? Bluff above the water and sharp below. What a fascinating modern age we live in.
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Oct 12, 2022 15:45
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A Proper Uppercut posted:I guess I never realized that steel and sails overlapped at any point. More iron than steel, I think. A lot of clippers were wooden-hulled on an iron frame (e.g. Cutty Sark). IIRC by the time the metallurgy for industrial-scale steel applications is mature, pure sailing rigs are mostly relegated to cheap, not fast. But pure sailing cargo vessels persist into the 20th century and you can find records of u-boats sinking them.
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Oct 12, 2022 16:01
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When the wind pulls on the sails, that force is acting way up high near the centroid of the sails, so it is both pulling the ship forward and causing it to tilt to the side. A bigger ship can withstand that sideways overturning force better and can thus handle more forward-acting force and go faster because drag from the hull increases a lot less with size. In modern sailboat racing bringing along passengers whose only job is to stand on the windward rail to help counteract that tilt and let them use more sail is a very real thing. In small one-handed dingy racing you will see the sailors hanging as far as they can off the side of the boat for the same reason. The more upright the boat is the faster you will go. If she was sitting in the middle of the boat then the wind would probably cause it to capsize: 
withak fucked around with this message at 16:08 on Oct 12, 2022 |
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Oct 12, 2022 16:05
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God drat I can't believe these books are actually getting me interested in sailing, or at least the mechanics of it.
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Oct 12, 2022 16:14
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It's fun you should take some dinghy sailing lessons.
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Oct 12, 2022 16:23
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A Proper Uppercut posted:I guess I never realized that steel and sails overlapped at any point. Several modern navies/coast guards have square rigged, steel hulled ships as training vessels or display ships. Apparently one is even a cruise ship: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Clipper Until the above was built, this was the only other 5 masted square rigged ship built. She was built in 1902 and had a steel hull: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preussen_(ship) Sailing ships built that late were mostly built for bulk haulage voyages around Cape Horn/to Australia. Tons of guano was harvested from small islands in the pacific and on the coast of Chile as fertilizer and wasn’t terribly high value, but needed to be moved in bulk. Timber, grain, wool, and metal ores from Australia were also common cargos. A coal powered steamship had to use quite alot of its storage area to carry coal for power on a long voyage and so sailing ships could remain competitive on very long voyages with big bulky cargos. The Suez and Panama Canals were really the nail in the coffin for the age of commercial sailing vessels as suddenly Chile and Australia came within reconomical range of stream-ships.
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Oct 12, 2022 18:17
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A Proper Uppercut posted:God drat I can't believe these books are actually getting me interested in sailing, or at least the mechanics of it. I've read the series multiple times and read several Wikipedia articles and other things about sailing mechanics and I still cannot wrap my head around how staysails and especially jib sails work. A square-rigged sail running before the wind, that's super easy to understand. A square-rigged sail going into the wind is conceptually more difficult but I at least vaguely understand the Bernoulli principle and how airfoils work so I can grasp it. A fore-and-aft sail on a swinging boom as is the common modern rig for personal sailing craft I also vaguely understand, or at least think I do. But how in the world staysails do anything, I just cannot get 
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Oct 12, 2022 18:41
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They work like a wing, just instead of lift pulling up it is pulling horizontal perpendicular to the surface of the sail. Under the right conditions (sailing into the wind) a component of that can be pulling in a useful direction.
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Oct 12, 2022 18:56
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Before you know it you'll be thinking about sailing downwind faster than the wind.
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Oct 12, 2022 19:00
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withak posted:They work like a wing, just instead of lift pulling up it is pulling horizontal perpendicular to the surface of the sail. Under the right conditions (sailing into the wind) a component of that can be pulling in a useful direction. I get that, that's airfoil physics. I understand how square-rigged sails can sail into the wind, because the spars get turned so that the whole sail is at an angle to the ship. But the geometry of the staysails confounds me. They're secured at three points that are all contained within the central longitudinal plane of the ship - one point to the mast in front of them, two to the mast behind them. How do they generate force in any direction other than "knock the ship over sideways?"
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Oct 12, 2022 19:23
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Kylaer posted:I get that, that's airfoil physics. I understand how square-rigged sails can sail into the wind, because the spars get turned so that the whole sail is at an angle to the ship. But the geometry of the staysails confounds me. They're secured at three points that are all contained within the central longitudinal plane of the ship - one point to the mast in front of them, two to the mast behind them. How do they generate force in any direction other than "knock the ship over sideways?"
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Oct 12, 2022 19:29
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Ravenfood posted:I thought they help keep the the ship from veering to windward while tacking. So they are just there to knock the ship over sideways, just not big enough to do it. Holy gently caress. So they don't actually move the ship forward at all? 
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Oct 12, 2022 19:37
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A Proper Uppercut posted:What exactly changed to almost double the speed? Engineering? Materials? W/r/t engineering, at least some ship designers would use rules of thumb for calculating volumes and centers of gravity instead of calculus into the early 20th century withak posted:It's fun you should take some dinghy sailing lessons. This is extremely good advice Kylaer posted:I get that, that's airfoil physics. I understand how square-rigged sails can sail into the wind, because the spars get turned so that the whole sail is at an angle to the ship. But the geometry of the staysails confounds me. They're secured at three points that are all contained within the central longitudinal plane of the ship - one point to the mast in front of them, two to the mast behind them. How do they generate force in any direction other than "knock the ship over sideways?" Remember that the staysail’s bottom rear corner (clew) is on a sheet of some length distancing it from central plane, so it sticks out to one side under power, like any other fore-and-aft sail
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Oct 12, 2022 19:41
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