Pirates of the Carribean, Return of the Tall Ships Options

[Crusher Bob]

The addition to cannon and/or MLRS to new ships is an attempt to provide ships with more ability to support troops on land via artillery fire, not to shoot at other ships with.

[Mal-2]

Seems to me that a wooden-hulled sailing vessel is probably no worse off, defense wise, than any other non-military vessel. As far as I understand it, modern fiberglass and plastic hulls aren't substantially sturdier than old-school wooden hulls. They're just a heck of a lot cheaper, and have less problems with hull fouling.

Modern pirates don't generally use military grade vessels, and can't stand up to a naval ship. As far as I recall the pirates described in Cyberpirates generally can't go toe-to-toe with a naval vessel either. I don't think the Flying Dutchman is any worse than a converted civilian yacht or cargo vessel for piracy.

The biggest disadvantage to a sailing ship, of course, is the reliance on local wind conditions for propulsion. You can mitigate that somewhat with magic. The biggest advantage is that it would have a lower Object Resistance, but I don't really see a whole lot of uses for that. I suppose it makes it feasible to use Vehicle Mask on your ship (you only need 6 successes to disguise your ship from another ship, instead of 8 to affect a modern vessel).

I like the idea though.

[FrankTrollman]

Ship length contributes to speed. Ship mass contributes to carrying capacity.

Wooden ships are heavier and slower for their length than metal ships. They are taller and thus make easier targets. Contrary to what has been repeatedly thrown around on this thread - a wooden ship is easier to spot with "sensors" than a metal ship of the same mass - it has a higher profile and is larger.

Wooden ships are more expensive to maintain, requiring a constant influx of new wood, pitch, and rope just to keep from being disolved by he sea.

With the singular exception of fuel consumption, a wooden ship falls in every category to a steel one. It's slower, carries less cargo, has a larger sillouette, costs more to make, costs more to maintain, requires a larger crew, and is weaker in a fight.

Unless you somehow cannot get your hands on synthetic diesel fuel to save your life (but can somehow get your hands on oak and pine tar regularly), there's no damn reason at all to go for a galleon when there are already scrap fleets of steel vessels that you could just appropriate and retrofit.

Any and all statements about building a galleon "yourself" make no sense to me because galleon production crews have historically been huge industrial affairs with hundreds of workers.

-Frank

[kigmatzomat]

I don't have the Pirates book but if this is true:

[fool]

Has anyone read the liveship trilogy by Robin Hobb? It's a series that has ships with sentient and moving figureheads. It's an excellent trilogy thats part of a nine book series. It's my fave trilogy of al time. The ships however, are particularly awesome, being able to align themselves witht he water and wind to move faster than anything else in teh water (of course they weren't going up against deisel powered destroyers.)
I ran an adventure back in sr3 where the team was smuggled into England by the Purple pearl. One of the PCs was Capt. Jack Sparrow (natch) but didn't know if he was actually him or delusional. It was fun and wooden ships seem like they would have a lower signal since a major part of signal is noise. Of course the purple pearl (part of Jack's pirate family) had loads of magical support spirits to copnceal, spells for vehicle mask, spirits to speed it along etc.