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So here's the scenario I envision where the weight becomes a problem. Nobody wants to exclude or discriminate based on building techniques - the game should be open to anyone who wants to build a ship. Two MOCers create frigates, both of 150 studs length, 40 studs beam, both of 38 guns, with 18 pdrs. Both are ship-rigged with approximately the same sail area. Now, as a newcomer to the game I would assume that these two ships would meet on equal terms. However, it turns out that ship A weighs half as much as ship B. It so happens that based on the arbitrary weight conversion ratio, ship B is the ideal weight for bearing 38 18 pdrs. Ship A, based on this conversion ratio, is far too light. Ship A is penalized and ends up being slower, and also having half as many hitpoints. This is despite being entirely comparable to Ship A in all other respects than weight. So we are now to tell the MOCer that has created ship A, which is comparable in all respects other than weight to ship B, that his ship is entirely inferior and that he should either remove half the armament, heavily ballast his ship, or simply deceive us about his ship's weight? All three options seem ridiculous to me. Weighing MOCs is error prone, may not be possible for everyone, and cannot be independently verified. Anyone can count studs, even in a photograph. Lego MOCs are really about illusion, and the different ways people come up with to create those illusions are what makes them great. How much a MOC weighs has never been part of that illusion, and I don't think it should be used to to calculate the most fundamental property in the game, as it will always punish someone.

I definitely agree that something like that is needed... I do not know what you are using for gun weights, but I'll make a couple of estimates. If I use the upper limit for a 9lb cannon as 31 hundredweight, and allow 100 shots of ammunition per gun, that gives the minimum tonnage of a ship carrying 20 guns (including armament) as 287 long tons. If I use the 25 hundredweight number, it is 245 long tons. These seem highly reasonable numbers to me. However, the ship is in minifig illusion scale, which means that it is rather smaller than it should be. My ship as a waterline length of 80 studs, which is quite long as lego ships go, yet this only comes out as 75 feet, which is short for a ship. At this ratio minifigs are also 4' 8" ! If you assume that minifigs are 5' 10" then you get 90-ish feet instead. I can easily see a ship of that size having a sufficient displacement to come in at 250-ish tons. I really think you're stuck between a rock and a hard place when calculating weight. My ship is very strong (I'm sure you saw my hogging test), and very light (coming out as 800 g, and 60 tons), but I can build a very heavy, dense ship, and simply by building it I am asserting that it floats in the world of lego, and you cannot say otherwise, even if all your calculations tell you that it should sink like a stone. My very heavy, dense ship can therefore support a very large number of heavy weapons, without any changes in its sailing qualities, being so heavy already. I can also make it extremely long and thin, and although structurally unsound and perhaps unstable it will be determined to be very fast. There's no easy way to deal with this - each lego ship necessarily occupies its own universe and you must come up with some way to compare them so that they can interact. I think that for some metrics (waterline length, beam, sail area) the comparisons are valid as long as the model is not too simplistic (currently the ideal ship is infinitely long, infinitely narrow, and has infinitely large sails) but weight is a nasty problem because you can't easily convert from lego to oak, and even if you could, you can't measure the structural strength of a ship. Whatever you decide to make the conversion ratio, it will cause all ships that are built lighter than the ideal to be too light for their guns, and all ships that are heavier than the ideal to simply be too heavy. My response in this situation would be to ballast my ship as heavily as possible or simply lie about her weight. I think you should simply leave weight out entirely and use the dimensions of the ship and sails to determine speed and hitpoints. You might need a few extra measurements to do this but I think it's reasonable. This would mean that those ships that look crammed full of guns would be penalized, while those that simply don't weigh very much will not be. It will also prevent someone from creating a long, thin stone that has an insane amount of guns and sails and getting the best of hitpoints, firepower, and speed. If you wanted to differentiate between heavily and lightly built ships you could make this an adjustable attribute that lets someone trade hitpoints and ability to bear armament for speed (within reason). By doing this I could build a relatively large ship, under-arm her, and then say that she is lightly built, and I get something in return for my reduced armament. Or, I could overgun her somewhat but say she is heavily built, so she'd be extra tough but a bit of slug. Simply adding sail area wouldn't help me, because without changing the ship's dimensions she would be overpressed. If this post is a little disjointed, it is because I've been thinking the problem over as I've been writing it so it has evolved with my thinking.

Very true, but ramming to sink rather than ramming to board was. Running into another sailing ship generally didn't do much damage beyond messing up the paintwork and the entanglement of the rigging. A galley could actually ram with a reasonable expectation of sinking its target because it had a dedicated ram and because galleys were very lightly built compared to a sailing ship so that they would be light enough to be rowed at high speed. The only time I can imagine ramming as a strategy for one sailing ship to sink another would be in the event that the ramming ship is so much larger and heavier that it can ride up over the beam of the target and break it in half. I believe that large sailing ships engaged with galleys would ram them if the opportunity arose, as they could crush them or at least break their oars and cripple them. Unfortunately, my ship is by no means complete and ready for battle, otherwise I should certainly accept. I think at this point it should float, but it has no decks, no guns, no standing or running rigging, and no crew, so I think it would make a sad account of itself. But it is actively being worked on!

That's a nice, simple solution. Unfortunately it's not available for Mac. I am able to open and edit the .xls is OpenOffice, but I can't see the results of any calculations. I can see the results in Quick Look, though, so I've been able to try some things. I did run into some odd behaviour, but I'm not sure if it's just because my setup doesn't work quite right. I tried punching in the numbers for my Xebec (a full hull model), which has a hull length of 80 studs, a beam of 22 studs, a total sail area (estimated based on the drawings and the scale I've chosen) of 4371 square studs, and a weight (again estimated using a lever and a 5 lb weight) of 750 g (so I'm going to say 900 g completed with rigging), with twenty 9 pounder guns. Without guns the estimated maximum speed was given as 10.2 knots. I'm not sure if the full hull part was taken into account here as Open Office can't seem to make heads or tails of the radio button for that. I found that adding the guns reduced the ship's speed to 5.5 knots, but that the ship's speed went up immediately if I then added more weight. I was able to add more weight up to 10 kg and still get more speed (up to 8.3 knots) that way. At 15 kg the speed starts dropping again.

This is really beautiful. I particularly like the gingerbread-work on the stern. The only thing that bothers me a bit is just how low to the water the stern-galleries are. They are lower than the gunports and I'd be terribly worried about the ship getting pooped by a following sea. The helmsman and the captain are also really exposed. Maybe you could raise everything up and have the gingerbread act as the quarterdeck rail. In any case, I'm sure you know best - right now you have a functional cabin which is hard to do in minifig illusion scale when you're trying to follow historical plans.

The rules are getting really well developed. I'm not sure I understand how some things scale, however - for the special attacks, it indicates that the damage increases by a fixed number of points. Is this per gun? Also, if a ship runs aground it always takes 10 points of damage. It seems like it would make more sense for it to take a percentage of its hitpoints in damage, since this would otherwise give larger ships (which were most vulnerable to grounding and would tend to take the greatest damage due to their great weight) an advantage. Perhaps the speed of the ship should be taken into consideration as well. Maybe the faster a ship is sailing, the more damage running aground causes and the longer it takes to warp the ship off. Also, I'd like the ability to slip my cable and not be penalized a turn for weighing. This would of course mean you lose the anchor. I'm not sure about the damage to the masts - if I have a very fast ship (maybe one with only two masts) and I lose my main mast, it should have a massive impact on my ship's speed, but right now it will only reduce all my speeds by 1. It will also have no impact on the sailing qualities of my ship. Also, what happens when the die comes up for a special events that cannot happen more than once or cannot happen at all (if the ship doesn't have a given feature, for example)? Unfortunately I can't run the tables as I don't have something that will deal with .xls files. Would it be possible to get them in another format or just the raw data as a .csv or something? Are fore-and-aft rigs treated differently with respect to speeds and their best points of sail? There doesn't seem to be any mention of boarding in the rules. Is it possible to carry another vessel by boarding?

Nope, the first sizeable swell will send a gun down a hatchway and through the bottom of the ship Eventually I'll have proper breeching and everything, but right now I'm just making sure they all fit and have room to recoil. I sometimes wonder how our lego ships accommodate the 12 men per pair of guns for 24 pdrs

Those tiles are there so that guns 1 & 2 can bear fairly far forward and also far enough back to fire as part of the broadside. The structural members really can't be covered up any further without creating lumps on the deck or raising the deck, and I'm unwilling to do either. The middle part of the deck above the keel should be considered unfinished. Brown wheels may indeed work better - however, the tan ones are the only round plates I have in sufficient quantity for 20 cannons, right now. At four wheels per gun, it really adds up

Forward half of the main battery, with weather-deck. The weather deck is made up of removable sheaves, so I can work on the ship...

Well, I'm mostly just using the plans I found (which I measure for general proportions) and a lot of iteration. I've found I don't really have the patience for LDD - mostly I'll just prototype stuff on the model or separately. I'll do one side and if I like it I'll do the other side. One of the nice things is that I can pretty easily pop pieces off and change the underlying framework as necessary (which it often is when the planking overlaps on a frame) since there's relatively little stacking. Sometimes I need to deviate from the original framework simply because it's the only way to get an acceptable curve (lego not having 2.5 stud pieces )

Apologies for the long delay between updates - I was forced to wait for parts. I've now (mostly) planked one side of the ship. I don't think the ship will end up entirely white, but I had to make a first attempt at her lines. The masts have been unstepped so that work can proceed. The bag of bricks is ballast as one side of the ship is much heavier right now

I disagree. If the two smaller ships did not have the weather gage they would be at a disadvantage against a larger, more powerful ship because they would be much easier to isolate. When a squadron has the weather gage it can always provide mutual support because the ship that engages the enemy first will downwind of its companion. When it does not, the enemy can attack the ship that is farthest to windward and potentially destroy it before its partner can beat up and join the fight.

So the wind is blowing from NE into SW? Was the intent to give the two smaller ships the weather gage and force the HellHound to beat up?

That looks much better. I always count studs and then come up with a conversion vs my diagram when it comes to checking dimensions or proportions. The other option is to put your camera on maximum zoom and shoot from across the room

Ah, that makes sense. I wonder if those cabins would be removed when the ship was cleared for action? I know that any below-decks bulkheads would tend to fall victim to the carpenter's crew. That would solve any accessibility problems for the guns. I'm still curious as to where your mizzen mast is going to go. In most models I've seen it seems to be located almost exactly halfway between the end of the poop and the mainmast.

This is really cool - I had no notion of the wheel being underneath the poop deck in this way on ships of the line. That said, it seems uncommonly cramped in there. Where do you plan to step the mizzen mast? On HMS Victory it is just abaft the wheel, but I think the Victory's wheel may be farther forward.

You may want to come up with stats for 18 pdr guns - they were actually the most common size for cannons on frigates. 24 pdrs were quite rare on frigates until the end of the 18th century.

Quick update - gunports reduced from 24 to 20, first pass at bow planking, and cleaned up the frame to be cleaner and less overbuilt at the bottom.

By all means, I make no claims as to the originality or particular notability of the cannon design. I'm sure it's derivative of something I've seen elsewhere. I just really wanted to have elevation while still having a carriage low enough that I'd be able to point out my gunports. And I wanted to use the minifig head since I think it does a good job of evoking the breech and cascabel of a carriage gun. I'm also seriously considering reducing the armament to 20 guns - that would give me another stud between each gunport and make things look much less crowded.

Prototype, with some incorrect tan bricks. A rib won't bear the weight of the whole ship without planking, but there's no problem attaching and removing stuff. The ribs are rigidly attached to the keel and to the deck, which are also attached to each other, so it forms a nice strong truss. In fact, the ship can be balanced on a single point with minimal hogging.

Yes, the guns are a bit tight, however I wanted to retain the number and positioning of the guns from the plans, without making the ship 30 percent bigger than it is already. I'd prefer my gunports to be 1.5 studs wide, but that really isn't practical, so here we are. They won't be full sized lego cannons, so it shouldn't be too crowded in there. As you can imagine, most of my new piece requests for lego would be for things with interesting dimensions and offsets I may cover part of the ship with tiles, however they do have their drawbacks - cost, and extra space taken up since they cannot be attached together the way that plates can be. I'll have to see how it looks when it's more complete.

It's been some time since I've been able to do any work on this, but I decided that before proceeding any further I should figure out where the masts and guns should go as they have structural implications. Pierced for 24 guns.

Gunwales.

You're right, I might have less complication using My main issue with that piece is that it makes a really stiff connection and I'm not sure I'd be able to turn my rudder if I use it. It would also have its own unique clearance problems with respect to the edge - I think I might have to remove the cheese slopes to have enough room to swing it that way on the hinge, especially if I have to shim it with 1x1 plates to get it on the right axis. My plan for hiding everything is to use some snot pieces to attach plates that cover the sides. I'll have to see how it turns out. It's definitely a bit of a phone booth I got the plans from this thread in a russian forum I found using google image search. The post is about halfway down the page. There are actually a bunch of detailed plans for different kinds of ships in the thread, including several xebecs. Here's a quick update. I've installed the rudder, and I've created the framework for the quarterdeck. I've also lowered the main deck and improved the way frames at the bows and stern are constructed. There's also a little bit of test rail amidships.