I remember reading about the "Fearless" model somewhere here; it's quite interesting. I wonder what purpose would Akella do with that ship. My first impression about that ship was that it was a modification of the existing stock Black Pearl, increasing it's number of cannons. From the screenshots, they both look pretty similar.
They're very different models! The sterns are completely different, for a start - "RN_Warship", "PO_Warship" and "SP_Warship" (and the original "Fearless") have flat, vertical sterns, compared to the more angular stern of "Lineship1".
As to the intended purpose of the ship, my guess is that it might have shown up if you'd chosen to play as Danielle rather than Nathaniel. The original plan was to allow you to choose to play either of them, and Danielle had her own path through the story. There's almost no trace of Danielle's story apart from some parts of dialog files "blaze_dialog.c" and "danielle_dialog.c" which are never used, and some other dialog files which aren't used at all. Some of that dialog refers to a battleship and it wouldn't surprise me if that was "Fearless". But now that you mention a similarity between
Black Pearl, alias "Lineship1", and those "Warship" models...
Also, in my guide, the 4th Rate Warship has a Royal Navy model which has 52 cannons, where as the other models have 44 cannons. Which of those two configurations is the original "Fearless"? And why is there a difference of armament inside that class of ships?
... it looks like they may both be wrong. I'll need to try some experiments playing the various ships, firing a broadside, and using external view to watch for cannon shots. But as far as I can tell by looking at the ships using GM Viewer, the "Warship" models only have 40 firing locators, which means regardless of what "Ships_init.c" says, they'll only fire 17 shots to a side, plus 4 to rear and 2 forward. Not only that, but the firing locators on the "Warship" models don't match the positions of cannons on the model. They do, however, look remarkably similar to the firing locators on "Lineship1"!
The reason about not including those special quest ships, was to not give any
spoilers for some quests, in which some ships appeared. If there are new players into the game, I didn't want them to read a spoiler about the ships that you can encounter in those quests, thus giving away the element of surprise
Nevertheless, if you think it could be useful to include those quest ships (like the Heavy Xebec from
Assassin's storyline), I could do that, but they will be at the end of the guide, separated, and with a SPOILER tag, so that people are warned that the element of surprise will be lost if they decide to read about these ships. Does anyone else agree on this?
I don't think "Spoiler" tags work in PDF. Possibly put them all at the end in a separate section with a big warning. Or possibly have a second document specifically for quest ships. Or just leave them out. Your document, your choice!
In any case, the information about the Satanist ships is really cool. I did'nt play 'Revolutions' period much, but when I saw in Vanderdecken's Cabin that there was a Satanist Kreyser class frigate, I was wondering how I could encounter that ship. Now that I know, it's pretty useful. My question would be: Why did you include a ship that, in that period, it's standard model does not exist? I can understand the rest of the ships used, but for that Kreyser, it doesn't make any sense for me.
There was general agreement that the original Satanist frigate, being a stock game ship, was lacking in detail. There were two ways of dealing with this.
@The Nameless Pirate chose to make a Satanist Kreyser. I chose, in parallel, to add more rigging and other details to the existing ship. Not wanting to waste any of that work, we used both of them. I'd also seen pictures of the
USS Essex which showed a different pattern of black and white to the one in the game, so I retextured one of the other "Essex" variants in black and white. Then I changed the original's white pinstripes to red, and the result was the Satanist Essex. That had to go into "Napoleonic"; the original ship had to go into "Colonial Powers" so that it would show up in original storyline "Tales of a Sea Hawk"; so that left "Revolutions", where both the original and the "Essex" were completely unsuitable. The idea is that the Satanists got hold of an old frigate and enhanced it a bit, which is why its stats are different to the regular Kreyser.
By the way, talking about the stock frigate on POTC: I remember that there were two models of the frigate. The first one you already mentioned it, but the second one has a green colour scheme, with a horse in its figurehead. It appears as the aground ship on Nigel Blythe's / Artois Voysey's side quest. Does it appear in the game anywhere else? Or does it have any use right now in the mod?
Yes, I remember the green frigate. Neither it nor the original blue and yellow frigate appear in the game - I simply copied the blue and yellow one's colour scheme onto the
]Mefisto. But the de-Satanised
Mefisto is still the
Mefisto model, complete with horns on the stern. The beached ship on Bonaire is part of the scenery, not an actual ship model.
I already did that. I made sure to easily distinguish between the three English Galleons, by adding a non-official extension to their ingame name. I also was very careful of using the correct screenshot for each one of them. All of those three ships are dual purpose, appearing as both merchant and military.
My apologies - I didn't spot the other two further down. The document says that the English War Galleon (heavy version) can be found (rarely) as a merchant - that should be impossible, it's a pure warship. It also says that the fast version (called English War Galleon (standard version) can appear as a merchant, which should also be impossible as that's supposed to be the accurate version of the real
Revenge, but indeed that ship is dual purpose in "Ships_init.c" - that will need to be corrected! With 18lb cannons, that's England's version of the Fast War Galleon. (Or more precisely, the Fast War Galleon is Spain's version of the
Revenge - in reality, after English race-built galleons such as
Revenge showed what they could do to Spain's more traditional slow galleons, Spain decided that it needed something to match them.)
I just have a question: If you change between 'Arcade' and 'Realism' modes, is there any differences on the cargo capacity for ships? If you can share with me the new standard value, I can put it right there, after I finish fixing my errors.
I must double check again all the text. That's the biggest issue when you modify an already existent document in your mother tongue, and you need to translate it to another language.
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