Worldbuilding - Ships, Travel Times, Pirates! - The Art of World Building

in this episode of the art of will budding channel we'll talk about travel over water this means wooden ships and what is meant by tall and round ships like those used by pirates and other terms we'll also figure out how to tell how long a trip would take using ores or the wind all of the info is based on my book creating places which is volume 2 in the art of world building book series and is found in chapter 8. as we get started remember to click the like button and subscribe to see more videos as for me i'm the author of the most in-depth book series a podcast a blog and courses at world building university which i founded i have over 30 years of world building advice tips and tricks for you there are a number of things that impact sailing between two different locations and one of those is the wind the direction and strength of this can change some countries also build better ships that are more sea worthy and they might have better sailors all of this influences trade routes which nations can conquer others or how difficult it is for them to do so with the wind we have leeway for how long it takes to get from one place to another this removes some pressure to get it right if we have a map we can also write not drawn to scale on it to help with this flexibility if we have oarsmen they are not going to be able to row at the same speed indefinitely and their endurance and training is going to change from ship to ship so one crew might be able to go faster than another of course wind speed is not consistent and then their wind direction is also not consistent both of these can affect the speed different types of ships also sail at different speeds under the same exact conditions if you have a frigate that is chasing a ship of the line it might be faster another thing is that ships are weighed down by the people who are on there some of those can be killed in combat for example and then there's the cargo the amount of food and of course the weapons and and munition at the start of a five month journey the ship is going to be weighed down more so than at the end so in theory it's going to be traveling slower at the start the ship can also be damaged a storm might have caused this such as breaking a mast or a yard my favorite explanation for why we have some leeway is that our ship may be sailing on a fictitious planet with possibly a different number of moons and anything else that may affect the sea this could be a kind of cheap excuse if we say that a frigate is sailing a certain number of miles and at a certain speed and therefore it reaches its destination in a certain number of days and someone else on earth could say hey that's not possible but we can always say hey man this is a fictional planet you can't really say that i am the god of this place i say what really works here and what goes let's briefly cover a few ship terms so that we are all talking the same language the only ones i'm going to cover here are the ones you need to understand in order to understand the differences between one type of ship and another because we're going to be talking about that more later the mast is the vertical pole you see in the middle of the ship some ships have none and some only have one some have two and some of them have three in a few cases there are actually four of these technically there's even a ship with five which i believe is called a clipper ship there are other terms for masts like the center mass is obviously the one in the middle the four mass is the one at the front of the ship and the one at the back is often called the nissan mast but we'll just call that the rear mast to keep this easier that mass is usually the shortest the one in the middle is usually the tallest if a ship only has two masks the one in the back is the one that's usually not there what's the point of a mast well it's to hold the yards those are the horizontal bars that the sails are actually attached to as it turns out not all of the yards are horizontal but most of them are there's also an expression you may have heard and that is that a ship is square rigged what this means is that if the ship is headed north to south and the yards are east to west they are squared up with each other that's what a square rigged ship means on the other hand there's something known as a latine rigged ship this means that the yard is sloped and runs parallel to the ship so if the ship is pointing north and south the yard is also pointing north and south most ships have anywhere from one to three yards per mast and there are names for these yards but we don't need to know what they are in order to understand what we're going to talk about here today some ships have a combination of the square and latin rigging and what this typically means is that the mean mass and the four mass of the front are square rigged and the missing mass or rear mast is latin rigged the reason i'm mentioning this is that some of this is going to come up when we talk about the different types of ships because the rigging is one way to identify them as you might imagine the number of yards sales and the way they're configured have an effect on the ship's speed we also want to talk about the sails in a square rigged ship the sails are actually in the shape of a trapezoid which means that they're wider at the bottom than they are at the top where they are attached to the yard on the latin rigged ships the sail is usually triangular and if you're having trouble picturing that just picture a sailboat on the other hand in the movies like the pirates of the caribbean the square rigged ships are what you would typically see one way that this affects the ship speed is that the square rigged ships do pretty well in the open ocean because the wind speed is usually fairly constant or at least it is more so than it is closer to shore the direction is also fairly constant again as it compares to being closer to shore when you are closer to shore the latin rigging allows the sailors to change the sail more quickly to take advantage of the wind speed and wind direction this greater adjustment allows better maneuverability and can actually make the latin rigged ships sail faster when they're closer to shore compared to a ship that is exclusively square rigged by the way if you'd like more stuff to help with world building my art of wheelbudding.com site has a bunch of free templates that you can download by joining the mailing list you can click the link in the episode description or the little information button in the upper right hand corner there are over 20 of these templates as you can see from this list most of them are microsoft word documents but the two calculator ones which come from my creating places book are excel spreadsheets that take care of the math for you you can just type in measurements from a map and find out how long it takes to go somewhere by dragon wagon foot or even ships if you're enjoying the video remember to click the like button and subscribe it's time to talk about ship rates and i don't mean hey that's a first rate ship or a third rate ship in the sense that the first rate is a really good one and the third rate is a kind of mediocre one that's not what we mean by ship rates the ratings are not a judgment of quality it's really just about the number of guns and personnel we're going to talk about this later but we may not want guns and gunpowder and therefore cannons on our world and we might want to have a replacement for them with something that is plausible but for the sake of this conversation about ship rates we're just going to talk about what the british navy does and of course they have canaans i've got a handy little chart that includes the officers seamen and boys and servants on the count of men who are aboard a first-rate ship is going to have somewhere between 100 and 112 guns and 841 men these are the biggest ships by contrast a sixth rated ship which is the lowest is going to have somewhere between 20 and 28 guns and 128 to 198 men in between those extremes we have the second third fourth and fifth rate ships anything that had fewer than 20 guns which is the sixth rate ship was not considered a rated ship all of the ships on this chart had three masts the two biggest classes the first and second rated ships have three full decks just for the guns which is a lot of firepower that means they were carrying as few as 90 guns and as many as 112. the third and fourth rate ships had two gun decks and the fifth and sixth rated ships had only one gun deck so the first and second have three the third and fourth have two and the fifth and sixth have only one deck devoted solely to guns for any ship that had more than one gun deck the biggest guns were on the bottom because you don't want them on the top since that would make the ship top heavy and more likely to overturn by the way i founded world building university and you can browse the course selection to see if i've uploaded a course you might like the link is below in the description also and this is important if you subscribe to my newsletter i give out coupon codes for courses including one to get the accelerated world building course for free it's normally 49. i may put a coupon code in the episode description here but i can't promise to keep up with that every month check it out at worldbuilding.university let's talk the ship types as well builders we could invent our own but i don't think we need to because people are not sick of the ones that already exist now vessels come in two basic groups the long ships and the round ships the round ships are not actually circular of course but they are called that because they are wide when compared to the narrow and streamlined long ships like those that the vikings used and as it turns out we're only going to talk about one long ship and that's called the galley the long ships are the earliest types of ships and all of them were basically designed for war or fast transportation not carrying cargo they were usually powered by ores but they would have maybe one sail for additional propulsion at times the galley is synonymous with vikings although it was used elsewhere it usually had a single mast for that sail and it had a metal prow at the front so it could ram another boat and board it while it's usually quite maneuverable it has a really wide turning arc and it requires calm weather while it can be used to go on the open seas it wasn't typically used that way it was mostly found along the shoreline the invention of guns and the addition of cannons to bigger ships is one of the reasons why this kind of ship fell out of favor so if your well doesn't have that kind of firepower the galley might be one of the more commonly seen vessels some of these could be quite large and have a forecastle and a rear castle for artillery and soldiers and as many as 25 oars on either side each ore being rowed by five men however that is not the kind of ship that's being used for war if it is in war it's leading the vanguard this is where the captain of a fleet of galleys would be by the way i'd love some support on patreon if you have even a buck to spare every month you can help me cover costs and just send me some financial love i have lots of cool stuff in there including transcripts stuff from my books and mp3s for my albums and videos since i'm also a musician check it out the link is in the episode description and if you choose to donate you are awesome and thank you so much for your support let's talk about the round ships they were originally designed for carrying cargo and passengers but of course they have been used for war this is pretty much what you've seen in every pirate movie unless i say otherwise all of the ships we're going to talk about are square rigged on all of the masts you may have heard the term man of war but that is not a ship type it's just a generic english name for any three-masted warship that has soldiers and cannons two examples of a mana war are the frigate and ship of the line but those are two different ship types this chart lists out the different types of ships and how many guns they have how many crew the maximum speed and knots and their total length the ships we're going to look at are the brig frigate galleon gunboat ship of the line sloop and sloop of war all of them have a maximum speed of roughly 11 knots though the frigate and gunboat could go up to 14 knots first we're going to talk about the brig which is a two masted square rigged ship that has a single gun deck this ship is really fast highly maneuverable and it can be used as a merchant ship warship or a scouting vessel pirates really like these because of all of these factors the frigate is also fast and highly maneuverable and it is a fourth hour fifth rated ship with one gun deck they are often used as scouting vessels for a fleet escorting something patrolling or even acting independently in fact these are the largest ships that worked independently because the bigger ships were considered too valuable to risk being captured or destroyed this is something that's obviously likely to happen if a ship is traveling alone there is something known as a heavy frigate and that means a frigate that has two gun decks instead of only one they are the same length as bigger ships like the ships of the line but they have so little firepower by comparison to those that they would typically just run away from such a vessel otherwise they would almost literally get blown out of the water we'll talk more about shifts of the line in a minute but during a line of battle where there's a row of ships on one side and then the enemies also got a row of ships on the other the frigates were not part of that ship of the line configuration and that's why they're not called ships of the line the frigates were present but they were typically behind the line the reason is that they were there to relay signals from one ship to another imagine if you're the last ship in a ship of the line configuration all you see is a ship in front of you you can't communicate to anything that's farther along therefore you would communicate to a frigate which was off to one side and that frigate would relay signals farther up the line the rules of engagement also dictated that these ships were not actually fired upon unless the frigate had fired upon another ship first let's talk about the fire ship which is an interesting variation this is not a type of ship because any type of ship can be turned into a fire ship this kind is designed to be set on fire and then sent into the enemy line of ships to hopefully catch other ships on fire this obviously means certain destruction to the fire ship itself and therefore valuable ships like a ship of the line were not used for such a vessel another ship type is the galleon which has two features that distinguish it from other ship types that is the mast and the prow at the front of the ship the prowl just has a distinguishable look to it like a beak another way to spot this ship is that the center mass and the foremast at the front are square rigged like all the other round ships that we're talking about but the missing mast the one at the rear is latin rigged this allows for a better point of sailing as a result this galleon could actually save days or even weeks on a long voyage over the open ocean in other words it would leave behind other ships that were pursuing it then there's the gun boat which we may have to rename if we don't have guns in our world but this boat is really small and it usually only has one or two cannons on it it's designed to be used in coastal waters and take on large ships where it's easily outmatched but if you have a dozen of these they can do horrific damage to a larger ship just by surrounding it and blowing holes in it these are cheap and easily replaced on the opposite extreme is the ship of the line this is a ship with at least 60 guns this includes all first second and third raid ships they get their name because of the configuration where they sail on a straight line firing at a parallel line of the enemy's ships the reasons both sides do this is so that they don't accidentally hit their own ships the first rate ships of the line are the biggest ships on the sea on the opposite extreme is the sloop which for most of us just means a sailboat this is too small to be a ship of the line and it's really only something we're going to use if our characters need a small wind powered vessel to get from one place to another if we would like them to use oars instead of a sail and the wind then we might have them use the galley which was the longship that we talked about first this loop is not to be confused with the sloop of war which is also called a corvette kinda like the car as the name implies this is a warship that has a single gun deck with 18 guns these are not rated ships because they only have 18 guns and that does not meet the minimum requirement of 20 in the british system but of course we can invent our own system and maybe call these seventh rated ships this loop of war has all sorts of different sail configurations not just the square rigged one now we'll talk about a privateer but this is not really a ship type any ship that is operated by a private individual or a group of them for a profit is considered a privateer a sovereign power would give something known as a letter of mark to the captain of the ship and that authorized this captain to engage in acts of war against other ships any time it got the loot from this a certain percentage of that captured prize was supposed to go to the sovereign power if you're thinking this sounds a lot like piracy well it basically is the difference between a privateer and a pirate is that letter of mark authorizing what they are doing one of the cool things about this is that here on earth in our history we had people who had one of these letters that would basically absolve them of their actions and they would sometimes get a letter of mark from another country like france and spain they would justify the attacks on spanish ships with the letter of mark from france and then do the exact opposite this was illegal and of course they didn't tell either country that they were doing this and of course some of them got caught and they were accused of being pirates and punished accordingly because they had violated the idea of being a privateer by playing two sides against each other some countries also refused to recognize the letter of mark from their enemies and then they would just hang the privateers as pirates sometimes they only threatened to do so as a way of extorting an exchange of prisoners or something else anything larger than a frigate was not typically used for this because it was considered unsuitable so therefore there wouldn't be many ships of the line being used as privateers by the way this youtube channel is based on my best-selling book series the art of will building so if you'd like all this advice written down somewhere it already is there's also more detail on everything we're talking about in the books which are available in ebook paperback hardback and audiobook they can be found at many libraries bookstores and most online retailers like amazon just click the links in the episode description there's also another book related to the series called 185 tips on world building the content is drawn from all three volumes and this book is usually free as an ebook on amazon and at other retailers or sometimes it's only 99 cents let's talk about ship speeds the first one we're going to talk about is when people are using ores because this is pretty straightforward the top speed doesn't really matter because people can't keep doing that for very long if there is a favorable wind a ship can do about two to three knots with an unfavorable wind it's about half of that or one knot to one and a half knots earlier i said that many of the wind powered ships can reach 11 knots at their maximum speed so you can see this is pretty slow by comparison and now comes the harder part which is trying to figure out how fast ships can travel by sale we should keep in mind that during a coastline hugging trip the ship will dock for the night in a porch if it is able to this is going to slow down the trip a little bit of course because they're not actually sailing for however many hours they are docked by contrast when sailing over the open ocean a ship will have enough crew that they can sell continuously i have some calculations that we're going to use these are going to be kept relatively simple they are also going to be done in miles speed is measured in knots a knot is one nautical mile per hour that means that a nautical mile is 1.151 land miles if you're wondering why there's a difference well the nautical mile accounts for the curvature of the earth while the land mile does not that's mostly a piece of trivia that you can surprise your friends with what this really means for us is that if we've decided the distance between two ports on the coast is 77 miles apart by land we would have to divide that number by 1.151 to learn how many nautical miles it would be in this case that would be 67 miles whether we measure in miles or kilometers has no effect on the time that the trip takes let's look at an example if we had 77 miles we would divide that by 1.151 to get 67 nautical miles traveling at six knots we would take the 67 nautical miles divide that by six knots to get roughly 11 hours of continuous sailing at 4 knots it would take 17 hours and at 2 knots it would take 33 and a half hours so it's really not as hard as it seems i do have a number of other subjects that are discussed in the book creating places but the last one we're going to talk about today is the one of weaponry if we've decided that there is no gunpowder guns or cannons in our world that means that the ships have no firepower therefore there is really no drama to these so the question is what can we use as an alternative before we talk about that we should probably understand what the cannon is how it works and how many people are needed to fire that so let's take a closer look the largest cannon typically found on a ship in the age of sail is a 36 pounder which means it fires a cannonball weighing 36 pounds this canine took 14 guys to operate one of these is a powder boy who goes and gets the gunpowder that role could be eliminated if we don't have cannons one thing that this means is that if we don't have 100 cannons then we have 100 fewer crew because we don't need those 100 powder boys the number of crews might be reduced when we reduce the number of people needed to operate a weapon that is going to replace our cannon we may not ever want to mention this but it's something to keep in mind there's also a chief gunner who is responsible for priming the cannon for firing but he's not actually the one who fires it but this role is the one who is in charge of the crew the rest of them are just called gunners there's a sequence that i describe in the book but i'm not going to go into here but it basically involves prepping the cannon for firing actually firing it and then re-prepping it one issue with the cannon is that there is tremendous recoil which means the cannon flies backward away from the edge of the ship or the hull therefore it has to be forcibly moved back into position by all of those gunners this is one reason why there are so many crew for these really large cannons so if we don't have a cannon then what can we use i did a lot of research into this and the only thing that i could find that really makes sense is the ballista which is basically a giant crossbow if you use something like a catapult well that has a motion that is going to interfere with the rigging because there are all those ropes holding the sails the ballista is one of the few things that has a firing motion that's similar to a cannon and you could actually have it inside the hull granted a ship might have to be built slightly different to accommodate these but it still could fit in there and fire through a hole just like a cannon the big question here is how much firepower and range does that really have the roman ballista could fire over 500 yards and it was made of wood but if we were to make ours out of iron and have metal for the arms that could give us even greater power we might also have a fictional alloy of greater strength like adamantine which can make it even more powerful such a fictional alloy could produce a range that is greater than the roman ballista a 12 pound cannon could fire 1500 yards while the practical range was a lot less we can certainly claim something similar for our new ballista being plausible is the bar we need to get over as far as firepower a ballista is strong enough to fire straight through an armored knight and pin him to a living tree we're talking about the real ballista here not the fictional one that we could invent obviously one could blow a hole in the side of a ship especially when the wood is not from a living tree because a living tree is much stronger wood than any wood that came from one in the book i go into some other details like how many people you might need to fire one of these but i'm not going to cover that here i'm also not going to cover how fast one of these could fire but i'm just giving you this basic idea of something that you could use to replace a canon with either you do some research on your own or you can pick up a copy of creating places and read what i came up with alright that's all for today's episode please remember to like the video and subscribe as always there's more info in the book that this is based on which is creating places from the art of will building book series you can find a link to it in the description below there's also a link to the free book another for world building university and the newsletter sign up link that will net you over 20 templates you can use throughout your hobby or career as an author or game designer thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: The Art of World Building

Views: 5,833

Keywords: World building, worldbuilding, fantasy, writing, Randy Ellefson, art of world building, artofworldbuilding, writing tips, explained, theory, how to, lecture, epic fantasy, guides, tutorials, writers, writing advice, fiction writing, help, world creation, setting, speculative, author, creative, fantasy world building, age of sail, sailing, pirate ship, pirate ship sailing, pirates of the caribbean

Id: NgSaqOEUwjo

Length: 24min 3sec (1443 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 24 2020